i4Life Darwin Core Archive Profile

It is desirable to have a common format for the exchange of checklists among partners in i4Life and in the wider biodiversity informatics community. It has been agreed to use GBIF’s Darwin Core Archive (DwCA) format for this purpose, but the GBIF and TDWG documentation permits or does not precisely define a wide variety of options. This might make life easier for checklist producers, but it makes the task of importing a checklist more difficult. In particular, implementing an import facility requires precision about which features are required and how these required features will be specified and used, which features are desirable or optional, which features may be ignored by some importers, and which will cause failure of the import process. According to the TDWG “Simple Darwin Core” pages, “it is up to applications to enforce further restrictions [on the use of the DwCA format] if appropriate, and it is up to the stakeholders of those applications to decide what the restrictions will be for the purpose the application is trying to serve.” Thus further clarification of this format is required to permit its use as a reliable common format for producing and receiving checklists in the i4Life project, which will allow not only CoL data but checklists from other partners to be represented without data loss and with reasonable ease of use.

Here, we provide suggestions for using the DwCA profile which was previously agreed for the CoL Download Service, with extensions and minor deviations, to achieve a common checklist format for the exchange of checklists, and propose to define more precisely how some optional features should be handled. This document should be read in conjunction with the GBIF and CoL Download Service documentation, which contain more detailed explanations of the construction of DwCA files.

This document will form the basis for a common checklist exchange format that we hope will become a standard but presently should not be regarded as a rigid definition. Rather, it is intended to provide a means to help identify and describe the differences which may exist among the checklists being transferred between partners, and to help reduce unnecessary differences. It is not “cast in stone” and may be revised if clarifications or improvements are identified which do not cause undue difficulties for some users. Some differences in usage may be inevitable as the needs of partners vary and significant effort would be required by checklist producers and importers to adopt a single standard for all purposes without some variations however we expect partners to do all they can to meet the standard in the medium term.

Furthermore, not all producers may possess all the data elements described in this document. It is intended as a guide to good practice in providing the data which is available; in some cases fields may be empty or omitted. It is beyond the scope of this document to recommend a minimum data set, and in any case different partners in i4Life have different objectives and modes of working, so that a data type which is vital for one partner may be irrelevant to another. Each partner in the i4Life project is free to decide, and importantly to document, the extent to which files they produce comply with these suggestions and the use of any additional data elements they include.