Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), originally called the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, is a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

scientific and educational association that works to develop

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

s for the exchange of

biodiversity Biodiversity is the variability of life, life on Earth. It can be measured on various levels. There is for example genetic variability, species diversity, ecosystem diversity and Phylogenetics, phylogenetic diversity. Diversity is not distribut ...

data, facilitating

biodiversity informatics Biodiversity informatics is the application of informatics (academic field), informatics techniques to biodiversity information, such as Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy, biogeography or ecology. It is defined as the application of information technolog ...

. 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 The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around th ...

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 on September 28–30, 1985, at the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva in Switzerland. The organisation was formed as an international collaboration to promote the wider and more effective dissemination of information about biological organisms. Its name was changed to Taxonomic Databases Working Group for Plant Sciences in 1986. It was accepted as a commission of the International Union of Biological Sciences in October 1988. The name changed to International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases for Plant Sciences in 1988. Initially focusing on plant taxonomic databases, in 1994 it expanded its scope to cover all taxonomic databases and changed its name to International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases. In 2006 the group decided to change their name to emphasise their focus was on standards for sharing biodiversity data, rather than on taxonomy or the databases themselves. However, they wished to retain ''TDWG'' for historical continuity, so the name became ''Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)''.

Activities

TDWG organises an annual meeting for its members. The organization was founded at the first meeting in Geneva in 1985. The association currently: # Develops, adopts, and promotes standards and guidelines for the recording, discovery, exchange, and integration of data about

organisms An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Many criteria, few of them widely accepted, have been pr ...

, # Promotes the use of these standards and guidelines through the most appropriate and effective means, and # Acts as a forum for discussion about

standards This organization publishes conference proceedings in the ''Biodiversity Information Science and Standards'' (''BISS''), published by

Pensoft Pensoft Publishers (also known as: Pensoft) are a publishing, publisher of scientific literature based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pensoft was founded in 1992, by two academics: Lyubomir Penev and Sergei Golovatch. It has published over 1000 academic and ...

References

External links

* Bioinformatics organizations Taxonomy (biology) organizations Biodiversity databases Organizations established in 1985 Working groups Standards organizations 1985 establishments in Switzerland {{Biology-org-stub