Darwin Core as a Vocabulary for Expressing Biodiversity Data as RDF

Abstract

Darwin Core is a glossary of terms intended to facilitate the sharing of biodiversity occurrence data and related information, such as specimen metadata, checklists, determination histories, and taxonomy. It is widely used by museums and herbaria to share specimen data with aggregators through fielded text files. This chapter discusses efforts to use Darwin Core terms to express these data as RDF. It describes the history and motivation of the Darwin Core RDF Guide, presents some of the difficulties involved in using Darwin Core in RDF, and gives examples that demonstrate the challenges that still remain for the community to address.