tdwg/rs.tdwg.org

Including version information in citations

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Some citations in the existing standards landing pages include version numbers, but I generally did not include them in the citation columns in the standards and documents metadata tables used by the landing page build script.

In theory, we have a robust system in the SDS for tracking versions, but at this point, it's pretty much a failure because I don't think TDWG has any consistent archive of prior versions of standards documents. In theory, the links to documents and their citations should be updated to their most recent versions, with a mechanism in place for people to see the older versions. The W3C manages this, and we should be able to as well.

There are versioned IRIs in the rs.tdwg.org metadata tables, but mostly they are for vocabulary components and not documents. This is an issue that should be dealt with in order to comply with the SDS's model for versioning, but probably not something to block the publication of the script-generated pages.

I think this is not a problem any more. For the standards that have actively managed and updated documents that are versioned (i.e. Darwin Core and Audubon Core), the header sections have "Previous version" and "Replaced by" URLs that will actually lead a person to those versions. So for any documents where we actually have prior versions, people can "follow their noses" from the current document (linked in the standards landing page) to any older version they want to see.

That doesn't solve the problem of having the version URLs in the citations themselves, but this is so inconsistent that I don't see how to handle it via script. If we really care, we could hand-edit the citations on the landing pages for AC and DwC. There wouldn't be that many to do.