Welcome to Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)
Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is an international not-for-profit group that develops standards and protocols for sharing biodiversity data. Read more
Basic Recommendations
The most widely deployed formats for biodiversity occurrence data are Darwin Core (wiki) and ABCD (wiki). New deployments of these and other XML based formats should use the TAPIR exchange protocol.
The TDWG community's priority is the deployment of Life Science Identifiers (LSID), the preferred Globally Unique Identifier technology and transitioning to RDF encoded metadata as defined by a set of simple vocabularies. All new projects should address the need for tagging their data with LSIDs and consider the use or development of appropriate vocabularies.
TDWG's activities within the biodiversity informatics domain can be found in the Activities section of this website.
Please consider becoming a member. TDWG needs people with IT skills to develop effective standards for sharing biodiversity data. We need biologists, taxonomists, zoologists, geoscientists, librarians and anyone dealing with biodiversity information. We need institutional members that could use our standards to ensure that what we develop will save you time and money.
There are three ways to join TDWG-
- Free registration - Required to access TDWG online resources
- Individual Membership - US$75/year
- Institutional Membership - US$500/year but US$400 if paid before March 1, 2008
Institutional members are entitled to up to five discounted registrations at the annual conference. Please visit the Membership page for more details.
Latest News
15-Apr-2008 Central African Biodiversity Information Network (CABIN)
The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) is pleased to announce that the new project called "CABIN" (Central African Biodiversity Information Network) started 1 April 2008. The aim of this project, funded for a period of 5...
14-Apr-2008 NC State University Insect Museum Implements LSIDs
The Insect Museum of NC State University has now implemented LSIDs for their collections with help from Roger Hyam, see blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/insects.
To quote the announcement-
"What does...
08-Apr-2008 Generalising Sensitive Species Data
Arthur Chapman and Oliver Grafton have just written a definitive guide to handling sensitive species data.
The Guide to Best Practices for Generalising Primary Species-Occurrence Data is the result of a project generated...
04-Apr-2008 Report on Australian National National Taxonomy Forum
The report of a National Taxonomy Forum held in October 2007 at the Australian Museum has just been released-
www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/abrs/workshop-forum/pubs/ntf-proceedings.pdf
While the report is...
13-Mar-2008 Launch of the BioCASE Portal
The following announcement taken from TAXACOM March 12, 2008 is another application of TDWG standards in action.
CETAF (the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities), in conjunction GBIF and the EU-SYNTHESYS project,...
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