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
04-May-2007 Australasian LSID Policy Workshop completes
Members of the Australasian Biodiversity Federation attended a three-day meeting in early April to make recommendations towards an LSID Implementation Policy.
For more information, please see the meeting website at...
04-May-2007 Request for Comments on LSID HTTP Proxy Usage Recommendations
The TDWG Infrastructure Project (TIP) Team is putting forward a proposal to make Life Science Identifiers (LSID) more interoperable with standard World Wide Web and Semantic Web applications. In that proposal we recommend the use...
03-May-2007 Brochure
A brochure outlining the features of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) has been produced. The aim of the brochure is to build TDWG's membership; a priority for 2007!
If you want to print copies, the brochure is...
30-Apr-2007 First TDWG Charter Under the New Constitution
Technical Advisory Group Has An Approved Charter
26-Apr-2007 Lee Attends IUCN-OASIS Workshop on Biodiversity Standards
Lee Belbin represented TDWG Executive Committee at the IUCN-OASIS workshop on Biodiversity Standards help at the IUCN in Gland Switzerland April 18 and 19, 2007.
The IUCN has been discussing the requirement for developing...
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