Darwin Core
A body of standards, including a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries.
Sponsored by Biodiversity Information Standards (TWDG), the current standard was last modified in October 2009.
Used in
Documentation
Identifiers
- Internal MSC ID
- msc:m9
Tools
-
A web application that offers data publishers wishing to serve to the GBIF network an easy interface for describing data elements as basic text files, composing an appropriate XML Darwin Core descriptor file to accompany them.
-
A tool to validate XML metadata against the Darwin Core Text Guidelines.
-
A software platform using Darwin Core and EML to facilitate the efficient publishing of biodiversity data on the Internet, using the GBIF network.
Known users
-
An aggregation of information on all the known species in Australia, collected from museums, herbaria, community groups, government departments, individuals and universities. All data is converted to Darwin Core.
-
GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility)
Established by a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF is a web portal promoting and facilitating the mobilization, access, discovery and use of biodiversity data. The preferred format for publishing data to the GBIF network is the Darwin Core Archive, and its Integrated Publishing Toolkit uses EML as its data standard.
-
OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System)
A data repository for marine species datasets from all of the world's oceans; it uses an extension of Darwin Core 2 as its data standard.
-
A web portal using Darwin Core to describe biodiversity data collected in Madagascar.
-
Four distributed database networks (MaNIS, HerpNET, ORNIS and FishNet) using a Darwin Core engine to make bioinformatics specimen data interoperable, mappable and publicly available.