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
08-Oct-2007 CATE LSID Resolution Service is live
The CATE project (Creating A Taxonomic e-Science) is a UK NERC-funded research project to create taxonomic web-revisions. The latest release includes an LSID Resolution Service (undertaken as part of a contract with GBIF). The...
03-Sep-2007 Request for Comment on TDWG LSID Applicability Statement
The TDWG Infrastructure Project (TIP) has been working on a new draft of the TDWG LSID Applicability Statement. This document-
provides guidance on how to use Life Sciences Identifiers (LSID) to meet specific requirements of...
02-Aug-2007 Geointeroperability Workshop Outcomes
A workshop hosted at CRIA during the first week in April 2007 clearly demonstrated the interoperability between TDWG and OGC standards. A Memorandum of Understanding was recently signed between TDWG and OGC and this work is a...
01-Aug-2007 TNC Interest Group Charter Now Approved
The Charter for the Taxonomic Names and Concepts (TNC) Interest Group has just been approved by the TDWG Executive Committee.
The Executive Committee recognizes that this interest group is core to TDWG's mandate: To develop...
16-Jul-2007 Annual Conference - Update
Contact information updated and inexpensive rooms at the conference venue released for general reservations.
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