Darwin Core
Darwin Core is a standard maintained by the Darwin Core Maintenance Interest 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.
├── .github
│ ├── ISSUE_TEMPLATE : Directory of issue templates generated by GitHub
│ ├── CONTRIBUTING.md : Guide on how to contribute, create issues, etc.
│
├── build
│ ├── doe-cv-build : Directory of build scripts for the degreeOfEstablishment controlled vocabulary
│ ├── em-cv-build : Directory of build scripts for the establishmentMeans controlled vocabulary
│ ├── pw-cv-build : Directory of build scripts for the pathway controlled vocabulary
│ ├── README.md : Workflow for generating a new version of the vocabulary
│ ├── build-termlist.ipynb : Juyter notebook to construct the term list
│ ├── build-temlist.py : Script to build Markdown pages that provide term metadata for complex vocabularies
│ ├── build.py : Build script to generate distribution files from the normative document
│ ├── generate_term_versions.py : Script to build the terms_versions.csv file
│ ├── qrg-list.csv : List of the term IRIs in the order that they are to appear in the Quick Reference Guide
│ ├── requirements.txt : List of libraries required by the build scripts
│ ├── termlist-footer.md : Footer to append to the generated term list document
│ ├── termlist-header.md : Header to prepend to the generated term list document
│ ├── terms.tmpl : A Jinja2 template to format the Quick Reference Guide
│ └── workflow_diagram.png : Figure used in README.md to show how to create a new version of the standard
├── dist : GENERATED Distribution files generated by build.py
│  ├── 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
│
├── docs
│ ├── doe : Degree of Establishment Controlled Vocabulary List of Terms
│ ├── em : Establishment Means Controlled Vocabulary List of Terms
│ ├── list : Darwin Core List of Terms documents
│ ├── namespace : Darwin Core namespace policy
│ ├── pw : Pathway Controlled Vocabulary List of Terms
│ ├── rdf : Darwin Core RDF Guide
│ ├── simple : Simple Darwin Core Guide
│ ├── terms : GENERATED Quick Reference Guide
│ ├── text : Darwin Core Text Guide (Darwin Core Archive specification)
│ ├── xml : Darwin Core XML Guide
│ ├── _data : Website navigation and footer
│ ├── _config.yml : Jekyll site configuration
│ ├── CNAME : Canonical Name record for dwc.tdwg.org
│ └── index.md : Website home page
│
├── vocabulary
│ └── term_versions.csv : Darwin Core term versions, contains the complete history of the terms
│
├── .gitignore : Files and directories to be ignored by git
├── LICENSE : Repository license
└── README.md : Description of this repository
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 Interest 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.