For more information on any of these recommendations, please contact us.
The ALA aims to enable access to any type of biodiversity information. The following subsections provide guidelines for some major classes of data. These represent the classes of data on which the ALA particularly expects to focus in the earliest stages of its development. As the project proceeds, other classes will be handled in more detail.
Many of the data standards below include a unique identifier for each record. The ALA strongly recommends that all data providers supply such identifiers. Some data objects will already have an appropriate globally unique identifier. Publications may be associated with a DOI. Species characteristics and other terms from controlled vocabularies may be associated with stable HTTP URIs as identifiers. In other cases, the ALA follows the guidelines from TDWG and recommends the use of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) for this purpose. Constructing an LSID to serve as a record identifier gives a good guarantee of uniqueness and also allows the data provider to use LSID resolution as a means for users to be able directly to access the associated data.
Two families of data standards are in wide use around the world for exchanging data records for individual specimens in natural history collections and herbaria (including living collections such as culture collections and seed banks) and also for observations of living organisms in the field:
Each of these standards has been used in several different versions. The ALA will support the same range of versions supported by GBIF (see http://www.gbif.org/participation/participant-nodes/resources/how-to-establish-a-participant-node/):
Both Darwin Core and ABCD were developed through the work of TDWG, which has recently been reworking all of its data standards to make them more compatible and easier to use in a wide range of different situations. As part of this activity, TDWG has developed a TaxonOccurrence vocabulary which will replace both Darwin Core and ABCD. As this standard is more widely adopted, the ALA will support and promote it as a preferred data model.
It should be noted that Darwin Core, ABCD and the TaxonOccurrence vocabulary are all designed to handle the exchange of “presence” data, i.e. data sets which comprise records of the actual occurrence of different species. These data standards are inadequate to represent the full complexity of many ecological data sets. In particular they lack any standard mechanism for expressing level and standardisation of recording effort or for recording the absence of a species of interest. The TDWG Observation and Specimen Records Interest Group is exploring ways to represent this further level of information, and the ALA will participate in this process. In the mean time, the ALA encourages data providers to use one of these existing standards to share their data and to provide a text description of any underlying data collection methods in the metadata for the data set.
Some data sets (particularly ecological data sets) will include data elements for which there is no corresponding property in Darwin Core or in the TaxonOccurrence vocabulary. In such cases data providers are recommended to use appropriate terms from other vocabularies to label these additional elements (see for example the range of vocabularies and ontologies listed by Marine Metadata Interoperability or SPIRE). If these elements are of general importance to biodiversity projects, it is also recommended to initiate discussion with TDWG to make standard recommendations on their representation.
Taxonomic and nomenclatural data is frequently much more complex than species occurrence data, with many nested relationships between data items. Different data sets contain different combinations of nomenclatural data (information on the origin and validity of scientific names), taxonomic data (judgments on which names correspond to real species, how these species are to be classified and how they relate to earlier names and species concepts), bibliographic data (deta