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.
Conference Presentations and Posters
The 2008 Annual Conference was held in October in Fremantle. Presentations, posters and demos in the form of PowerPoint, PDF and Flash video files are now linked to the program and are also available in alphabetical order by presenter at http://www.tdwg.org/conference2008/program/slides-upload/.
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 by March 1
Institutional members are entitled to up to five discounted registrations at the annual conference. Please visit the Membership page for more details.
Latest News
19-Oct-2006 Proposed Task Group on TCS Usage
There is a proposal for a new task group to investigate usage issues of TCS.
10-Jul-2006 A Case for LSIDs and RDF in Biodiversity Informatics
What's the Problem?
Imagine you are a biologist looking at a group of organisms. You may be interested in these organisms because they occupy similar ecological niches or the same geographical region or for any other number of...
See the News Archive for more news.


