Biodiversity Information Standards


Biodiversity Information Standards is a non-profit scientific and educational association that works to develop open standards for the exchange of biodiversity data, facilitating biodiversity informatics. It is affiliated with the International Union of Biological Sciences. It is best known for the Darwin Core standard for exchanging biodiversity, which has been used by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility to collect millions of biological observations from museums and other organizations from around the world.

History

TDWG was founded in 1985 as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group; the first meeting took place from September 28–30, 1985, at the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva in Geneva, Switzerland. The organisation was formed to establish an international collaboration to promote the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the world's heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large. It was accepted as a commission of the International Union of Biological Sciences in October 1988. Initially focussing on plant taxonomic databases, it expanded its scope to over all taxonomic databases in 1994.

Activities

TDWG organises an annual meeting for its members. The organization was founded at the first meeting in Geneva in 1985.
The association currently:
  1. Develops, adopts, and promotes standards and guidelines for the recording, discovery, exchange, and integration of data about organisms,
  2. Promotes the use of these standards and guidelines through the most appropriate and effective means, and
  3. Acts as a forum for discussion about biodiversity informatics standards
This organization publishes conference proceedings in the Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, published by Pensoft.

Standards published