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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
│   ├── dwc_terms_guides_rdf      : Directory containing editable template for generating RDF guide
│   ├── dwc_terms_guides_text     : Directory containing editable template for generating text guide
│   ├── dwc_terms_guides_xml      : Directory containing editable template for generating XML guide
│   ├── dwc_terms_namespace       : Directory containing editable template for generating namespace policy
│   ├── dwc_terms_simple          : Directory containing editable template for generating Simple DwC guide
│   ├── 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
│   ├── xml                       : Directory of build script and configs for XML extension definitions
│   ├── ext                       : Directory for GENERATED XML extension definitions
│   ├── README.md                 : Workflow for generating a new version of the vocabulary
│   ├── build_other_doc_header.py : Script to build non-list of terms documents from their editable templates
│   ├── build-termlist.ipynb      : Obsolete Juyter notebook to construct the term list (morphed to .py version)
│   ├── 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
│   ├── update_previous_doc.py    : Script to move current doc to a version and update version links in it
│   └── 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
│   ├── all_dwc_vertical.csv      : GENERATED CSV file with all Darwin Core terms as a column
│   ├── 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 (GENERATED except for index.md)
│   ├── 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 (manually maintained)
│
├── vocabulary
│   └── term_versions.csv : GENERATED 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

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 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.