Stanley Blum1 & John Wieczorek2
1 California Academy of Sciences, 875 Howard St., San Francisco, CA 94103 USA
2 Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 3101 Valley Life Sciences Building, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3160
The Darwin Core 2 is a simple set of data element definitions designed to support the sharing and integration of data that document the occurrence of organisms in space and time, as well as the presence of specimens in biological collections. Information resources falling within this scope include databases about natural history collections, living collections (i.e., zoological and botanical gardens), germplasm and genetic resource collections, and data sets produced from biodiversity survey and monitoring programs. These data resources support a wide variety of purposes and consequently they have different structures, but all can contribute to documenting the distributions of organisms. A secondary function of the Darwin Core is to enable a user to discover the contents of biological collections. Because biological collections are diverse, however, the Darwin Core supports the search and retrieval of descriptive information in relatively simple ways.
The Darwin Core 2 was proposed as a DRAFT standard in 2004, and a revised version was posted on the review site (http://darwincore.calacademy.org) on July 11. Pending issues and suggested modifications have been discussed on the site and via a mailing-list/newsgroup hosted by GBIF. The changes and rationale behind them will be presented and comments invited.