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
14-Jan-2008 Biodiversity Information Networks Database (BIND)
A database of biodiversity information related network organizations has been created on the TDWG site at www.tdwg.org/biodiv-networks/.
The list was generated by Neil Thomson as one of the outcomes of an NCD project...
03-Jan-2008 NCD Developments in 2007
TDWG's Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD) data standard has seen major developments in 2007, mainly thanks to grants from the TDWG Infrastructure Project (who were in turn funded by the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation). The...
21-Dec-2007 Chairman's Message
Dear TDWG Members and Friends
As the new Chairman, I'm looking forward to helping raise TDWG's profile in the biodiversity informatics community in 2008. The TDWG Infrastructure Project has achieved much, but ends this month....
12-Dec-2007 Executive Summaries
We have done a poor job in the past in communicating effectively to a general audience about our work. The TDWG Infrastructure Project has addressed this problem in a number of ways. One has been to prepare a set of Executive...
03-Dec-2007 TDWG Now OASIS Member
As part of the process required for developing a species conservation status standard in collaboration with IUCN and the Conservation Commons, TDWG has become a Contributing Association member of the Organization for the...
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