Australian herbaria have interchanged specimen data using the HISPID TDWG standard for nearly 20 years. HISPID is an existing TDWG standard describing the data elements required for the meaningful interchange of herbarium specimen data sets. ABCD is a generalised standard for the interchange of specimen and observation records. Our attempts to implement Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH) using ABCD resulted in some loss of information and enforced relaxation of content standards compared to HISPID.

We will describe the process used to reconcile these two TDWG standards through the extension mechanism of ABCD and the restriction mechanism of XML Schema. We also discuss the challenges encountered enforcing data integrity in ABCD, while at the same time meeting the needs of the Australian herbarium community in a ‘real-world’ federated application.