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
16-Jul-2007 The first Task Group Charter Now Approved
The Darwin Core Task Group charter is the first of TDWG’s task groups to be approved by the Executive Committee. This task group sits under the Observations and Specimen Records Interest Group.Interest Groups provide the home...
11-Jul-2007 Infrastructure Project: Supported Round-2 projects
The TDWG Infrastructure received 29 project proposals totaling US$730,782 for Round-2 support. The priorities were
Advancing the deployment of LSIDsAligning with the TDWG Architecture
15 proposals were able to be...
10-Jul-2007 TDWG Congratulates GBIF on the Launch of its New Portal
The launch of the new GBIF portal occurred at the twelfth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of Parties' Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, held at UNESCO headquarters in...
09-Jul-2007 IUCN-OASIS Second Workshop on Biodiversity Standards
The second meeting organized by IUCN to discuss biodiversity standards was held at Conservation International (Arlington, Virginia) on June 26. Lee Belbin and Roger Hyam represented TDWG and Éamonn O Tuama represented GBIF.
The...
19-Jun-2007 LSID Policy Workshop
A workshop to develop a policy on LSID deployment was sponsored by the TDWG Infrastructure Project. The workshop was hosted by Greg Whitbread at the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra April 2-4 2007.
The workshop...
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