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
25-Jul-2008 EDIT Summer School 2008 ‘Modern Taxonomy and Field Work’
The EDIT Summer School 2008 is an initiative of the European Network of Excellence EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy). It aims to train students in “Best Practice” of field sampling and various aspects of taxonomic...
18-Jul-2008 TapirBuilder launched
Output models and query templates are special XML files that play an important role in the TAPIR protocol. They are used in search and inventory operations, but sometimes can be difficult to write, especially for those who are...
04-Jun-2008 TDWG 2008 in Fremantle
Registration for TDWG 2008 is now open at www.TDWG.org/conference2008/registration. The conference will be held at the Maritime Museum of Western Australia in Fremantle, about 20km southwest of Perth.
Details about the...
15-Apr-2008 Central African Biodiversity Information Network (CABIN)
The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) is pleased to announce that the new project called "CABIN" (Central African Biodiversity Information Network) started 1 April 2008. The aim of this project, funded for a period of 5...
14-Apr-2008 NC State University Insect Museum Implements LSIDs
The Insect Museum of NC State University has now implemented LSIDs for their collections with help from Roger Hyam, see blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/insects.
To quote the announcement-
"What does...
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