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
│   ├── build_other_doc_header.py : Script to build non-list of terms documents from their editable templates
│   ├── build-derivatives.py      : Build script to generate distribution files from the normative document
│   ├── build-termlist.py         : Script to build Markdown pages that provide term metadata for complex vocabularies
│   ├── doe-template              : Templates for the degreeOfEstablishment controlled vocabulary document
│   ├── 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
│   ├── em-template               : Templates for the establishmentMeans controlled vocabulary document
│   ├── ext                       : Directory for GENERATED XML extension definitions
│   ├── generate_term_versions.py : Script to build the terms_versions.csv file
│   ├── list-template             : Templates for the generated term list document
│   ├── pw-template               : Templates for the pathway controlled vocabulary document
│   ├── qrg-list.csv              : List of the term IRIs in the order that they are to appear in the Quick Reference Guide
│   ├── qrg-template/terms.en.jinja : A Jinja2 template to format the Quick Reference Guide
│   ├── README.md                 : Workflow for generating a new version of the vocabulary
│   ├── requirements.txt          : List of libraries required by the build scripts
│   ├── termlist-dictionary.en.json : Values available for translation for term list documents.
│   ├── 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
│   └── xml                       : Directory of build script and configs for XML extension definitions
│
├── dist                          : GENERATED Distribution files generated by build-derivatives.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 ('+' means GENERATED, ':' means manually maintained)
│   ├── ar, cs, etc       + Translations of the English pages, managed by Crowdin
│   ├── CNAME             : Canonical Name record for dwc.tdwg.org
│   ├── _config.yml       : Jekyll site configuration
│   ├── _data             : Website navigation and footer
│   ├── doe               + Degree of Establishment Controlled Vocabulary List of Terms
│   ├── em                + Establishment Means Controlled Vocabulary List of Terms
│   ├── examples          : Longer examples linked from other documents
│   ├── favicon.ico       : Web page icon
│   ├── Gemfile           : Ruby Gem configuration
│   ├── Gemfile.lock      : Ruby Gem configuration
│   ├── index.md          : Website home page (manually maintained)
│   ├── list              + Darwin Core List of Terms documents
│   ├── namespace         : Darwin Core namespace policy
│   ├── pw                + Pathway Controlled Vocabulary List of Terms
│   ├── rdf               : Darwin Core RDF Guide
│   ├── _sass             : Stylesheets
│   ├── simple            : Simple Darwin Core Guide
│   ├── terms             + GENERATED Quick Reference Guide
│   ├── text              : Darwin Core Text Guide (Darwin Core Archive specification)
│   └── xml               : Darwin Core XML Guide
│
├── 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
├── crowdin.yml           : Crowdin Git integration configuration
├── LICENSE               : Repository license
└── README.md             : Description of this repository

Term and website translation

For users

The Darwin Core website is available in multiple languages, see the "文A" menu.

Translations in machine-readable format are in the rs.tdwg.org repository, you will need three files:

• terms/terms-translations.csv
• dc-for-dwc/dc-for-dwc-translations.csv
• dcterms-for-dwc/dcterms-for-dwc-translations.csv

For translators

Translations are managed within Crowdin, which makes it easy to keep up with any changes to Darwin Core. If you wish to contribute please go to the Crowdin project and request to join, then email the Darwin Core Maintenance Group.

The Crowdin project has two sections:

• [tdwg.rs.tdwg.org] translations – this contains term definitions for several standards. Darwin Core's definitions are in the files terms, dc-for-dwc and dcterms-for-dwc, and the vocabularies are in the files establishmentMeans, degreeOfEstablishment and pathway.
• [tdwg.dwc] master — this contains the website, such as the home page, navigation menu, and the text surrounding the lists of terms.

Translating navigation.json first is recommended, as you will then be able to browse the preview site at https://dwc-translation-preview.tdwg.org/.

To avoid conflicts, edits to translations should only be made in Crowdin.

For developers of this website

Translations of term data (labels, definitions, examples, comments) are retrieved from the rs.tdwg.org repository, see rs.tdwg.org/TRANSLATIONS.md for details on that process.

Translations of the rest of the Darwin Core website (guides, prose sections, navigation menu etc) is managed here. crowdin.yml configures files required for translation, and as content is translated Crowdin will create pull requests. The only manual edits required are for building a new language (configured at the top of build/build-termlist.py and, once the translation is ready, adding it to the end of the navigation menu.

GitHub Actions are configured to rebuild the website automatically as translations are created and updated. Changes are automatically deployed to https://dwc-translation-preview.tdwg.org/, when the pull request is approved they will appear on https://dwc.tdwg.org/. (Note if the navigation menu hasn't been translated it will be necessary to edit the URL to get to each page.)

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.