Darwin Core

Darwin Core is a standard maintained by the Darwin Core maintenance group. It includes 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 identifiers, labels, and definitions. Darwin Core is primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information.

Getting started

Darwin Core quick reference guide

Documents:

• List of terms document: Comprehensive metadata for current and obsolete terms in human readable form
• Complete term history table: A CSV file with the full version history of Darwin Core terms
• Distribution documents: Simple CSV files to start using Darwin Core
• Website documents: Markdown files that form the source for the Darwin Core website

Community:

• How to contribute: a guide on how to contribute to Darwin Core
• Darwin Core Q&A: an open forum on the use of Darwin Core

Repo structure

The repository structure is described below. Files/directories indicated with GENERATED should not be edited manually.

├── README.md                 : Description of this repository
├── LICENSE                   : Repository license
│
├── standard                  : All content considered part of the Darwin Core standard
│   ├── vocabularies
│   │   └── term_versions.csv : Darwin Core term versions, contains the normative definitions of the terms
│   │
│   └── documents
│       ├── simple            : Simple Darwin Core guide
│       ├── rdf               : RDF guide
│       ├── text              : Text guide
│       └── xml               : XML guide
│
├── www                       : GENERATED Darwin Core website
│   └── guides
│       └── index.html        : GENERATED Darwin Core quick reference guide
│
├── dist                      : GENERATED Distribution files generated by build.py
│   ├── dwc_terms.csv         : GENERATED CSV file with the recommended Darwin Core terms, definitions, etc.
│   ├── simple_dwc_horizontal.csv : GENERATED CSV file with Simple Darwin Core terms as a row
│   └── simple_dwc_vertical.csv : GENERATED CSV file with Simple Darwin Core terms as a column
│
├── build
│   ├── build.py              : Build script to generate distribution files from the normative document
│   └── config                : Configuration files for build.py
│       ├── index.tmpl        : Template for index.html
│       └── terms.csv         : Configuration for the recommended terms, incl. order, labels, examples
│
├── .github
│   ├── CONTRIBUTING.md       : Guide on how to contribute to Darwin Core
│   └── ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md     : Template for issues
│
└── .gitignore                : Files and directories to be ignored by git

Contributors

List of contributors

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Recommended citation

For Darwin Core in general, consider the peer-reviewed article on Darwin Core:

Wieczorek J, Bloom D, Guralnick R, Blum S, Döring M, et al. (2012) Darwin Core: An Evolving Community-Developed Biodiversity Data Standard. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29715. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029715

For this repository:

Darwin Core maintenance group, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) (2014). Darwin Core. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.592792

The citation above represents all versions of the repository. Specific versions/releases from 2011 onwards are also deposited on Zenodo.