Standard terminologies must provide a stability of definitions. If publications refer to the URI of a term, the link must be semantically stable and be true to the definition intended by the author.

That said, with minor increments of the standard, definitions of terms can only be broadened or made more explicit, if the original sense of the definition remains valid. The community discussion leading to a refinement of a term should consider this. If a definition changes substantially, it may receive an own URI and replace any redundant or deprecated terms. The deprecated terms will remain available at their original URI.

If alterations in terms lead to incompatibility with previous versions, a new major version of the Trait-data Standard Vocabulary may be issued, providing new versioned URIs for all terms of the standard that have been altered since the previous major version.

Discussions on terms and versions are coordinated in the Github Issues.

v0.8.0, released 29 May 2018

v0.7.0, released 21 March 2018

major changes

v0.6.1, released 21 Nov. 2017

v0.6, released 14 Nov. 2017

major changes

  • Construct multi-page website using Rmarkdown Website
  • add recommendations on how to build trait thesaurus

minor changes

v0.5, released 3 Nov. 2017

Website | Github release | DOI:

major changes

  • fix URIs of terms, forward URI of terms identical to DwC
  • removed colum ‘vocabulary’, define constrained vocabulary in Comments instead

minor changes

  • spell-checking terms and descriptions, remove reference to Exploratories

v0.4, released Aug. 2017

v0.2, released 12 Mai 2017