Ecosystem Associates, 607 Paco Drive, Los Altos, CA 94024, USA
A longstanding requirement of the biodiversity informatics community has been the establishment of a standard for sharing biocollections data. Recently, there has been substantial interest in expressing the locational aspects of collections records using broadly accepted specifications such as those published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
We propose a schema that combines aspects of the Darwin Core information model with locational data and metadata constructs developed during the early phases of the BioGeomancer project. It employs various definitions from the Geography Markup Language (GML) to express time and location, and conforms to the definition of a GML Application Schema. As such, it mandates an alternating pattern of element definitions that reflect the object-property model of GML and the class-property model of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Records conforming to our proposal thus allow biocollections data to be deployed in a Web Feature Service (WFS), and analyzed by the growing array of geospatial software tools that support the GML specification.