Darwin Task Group Charter

1. NAME of the Task Group: Darwin Core (DwC)

2. VERSION HISTORY of the Charter Document: Version 1.0, October 10, 2006; Berkeley, California

3. CONVENER: John Wieczorek; Museum of Vertebrate Zoology; University of California; Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Phone: 01-510-642-5409; Fax: 01-510-643-8238; Email: tuco-at-berkeley-dot-edu

4. CORE MEMBERS: Stanley Blum (California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA); John Wieczorek (Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley, CA); Renato de Giovanni (Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental, Campinas, Brazil); Stephen Long (Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley, CA)

5. HOME ADDRESS: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/DarwinCore/WebHome

6. PURPOSE:

   The Darwin Core is designed to facilitate the exchange of information about the geographic occurrence of organisms and the physical existence of biotic specimens in collections. Extensions to the Darwin Core provide a mechanism to share additional information, which may be discipline-specific, or beyond the commonly agreed upon scope of the Darwin Core itself. The Darwin Core and its extensions are minimally restrictive of information content by design, since doing so would render the standard useless for the implementation of data quality tools.

7. BACKGROUND:

   Darwin Core was originally a product of The Species Analyst Project at the University of Kansas. During 2001-2003, under the Mammal Networked Information System (MaNIS) Project at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the University of Kansas Biodiversity Research Center and the California Academy of Sciences, the first version of the Darwin Core 2 was developed in tandem with the DiGIR protocol and its publicly released provider and portal software. Until 2006 there was a proliferation of Darwin Core versions based on the originally published (version 1.2). MaNIS was the first deployment of a distributed database network based on DiGIR (16 June 2002), using a revision (version 1.21) of the original Darwin Core 2. It is version 1.21 upon which the proposed Darwin Core, Geospatial Extension, and Curatorial Extension are most closely based.

8. SCOPE:
   
   • What is in scope?
     • Collections of any kind of biological objects or data.
     • Terminology associated with biological collection data.
     • Striving for compatibility with other biodiversity-related standards.
     • Facilitating the addition of components and attributes of biological data.
   • What is not in scope?
     • Data interchange protocols.
     • Non-biodiversity-related data.
     • Purely taxonomic data.
9. AUDIENCE:
   • Biodiversity data holders (organziations, institutions, researchers).
   • Consumers of biodiversity data.
   • Developers of collections management systems.
   • Other TDWG interest and task groups.
   • Protocol developers (DiGIR, TAPIR).
   • Biodiversity network developers.

10. Schedule of Milestones and Products:

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