Basic Standards 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 everyone with a strong interest in biodiversity information to participate in developing effective standards for sharing that information. We need IT professionals, taxonomists, ecologists, geoscientists, and librarians. We need members from institutions and agencies that do or could use our standards to make their data more usable. Your participation ensures 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
09-Oct-2009 Darwin Core Ratified as a TDWG Standard
The TDWG Executive Committee announces the official ratification of Darwin Core (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm) as a TDWG standard. Darwin Core joins four...
27-Sep-2009 Charles Copp
It is with very deep sadness that I report the death of Charles Copp on Thursday September 24th 2009 after a long and valiant struggle against a brain tumour.
Many people in our communities will have come across Charles in his...
14-Sep-2009 Public Review of TAPIR
TDWG is pleased to announce the commencement of the Public Review of the TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval (TAPIR) - a method for sharing biodiversity information. Since being officially put forward as a draft,...
28-Jul-2009 Biodiversity Informatics databases
As you may be aware, TDWG is helping to support our community through three databases-
Biodiversity Informatics related projects and organizations (http://www.tdwg.org/biodiv-projects/) Biodiversity Informatics related networks...
28-Jul-2009 Biodiversity Informatics databases
As you may be aware, TDWG is helping to support our community through three databases-
Biodiversity Informatics related projects and organizations (http://www.tdwg.org/biodiv-projects/) Biodiversity Informatics related networks...
See the News Archive for more news.


