The Darwin Core has been a de facto standard for biodiversity occurrence data exchange since it was first proposed in 2001. Since then, without official standard status and without a clear mechanism for extension, several flavors of the Darwin Core have proliferated, defeating the overall goal of data interoperability for which it was meant as a solution. The proposal of this task group is to make Darwin Core and two of its broadly used extensions into accepted standards.

Darwin Core is designed to facilitate the exchange of information about the geographic occurrence of organisms and the physical existence of biotic specimens in collections. Extensions to the Darwin Core provide a mechanism to share additional information, which may be discipline-specific, or beyond the commonly agreed upon scope of the Darwin Core itself. The Darwin Core and its extensions are minimally restrictive of information content by design, since doing so would render the standard useless for the implementation of data quality tools.