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
03-Mar-2008 An Events Calendar
We were unaware of general events calendar at other biodiversity informatics sites so Ricardo has kindly added one as a plug-in for Typo3 for the TDWG site at:
Once you have logged into the site,...
19-Feb-2008 Short note on LSID Tester tool published
A short note on Rod Page's LSID Tester tool has been published in the Open Access journal Source Code for Biology and Medicine. The DOI is doi:10.1186/1751-0473-3-2 and the direct link is www.scfbm.org/content/3/1/2/....
15-Feb-2008 LSID Authority Setup Guides
The TDWG Secretariat and the TDWG Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID) Task Group announce the availability of the LSID Authority Setup Guides- www.tdwg.org/activities/guid/documents/lsid-setup-guides/ These guides were...
07-Feb-2008 TDWG 2008 in Fremantle, Australia
A preliminary web site for TDWG 2008 has been established. Information will be added to the site as it becomes available. A preliminary schedule for presentations will hopefully be established by the end of February.
The...
29-Jan-2008 The Nordic LSID e-infrastructure is starting
The aim is to generate or retrieve LSIDs for all organisms in the region. The work will start on from Lepidoptera for which three different taxonomies are currently being used in the region, and thus data integration by...
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