I’ve been waiting for these two pieces of news for a long time, and they’re finally here!
The new and improved GBIF.org went live last week, featuring more intuitive search functionality, a cleaner front end user interface, and better support for the Humboldt and other Darwin Core extensions. This release also marks the official transition to the Catalogue of Life becoming the taxonomic backbone of GBIF, which I think is really exciting.
The Darwin Core Data Package (DwC-DP) has been ratified! This is a major update to how we can use Darwin Core to structure and share our data. The Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) is sufficient for most use cases, I think, as demonstrated by the 100,000+ datasets you can download as DwC-A from GBIF, but the data package removes the restrictions of the star schema and allows for linking any number of data tables through primary keys. There are tens of possible table types that can be linked in data packages, but you can, at minimum, provide two tables, event and occurrence, to create a data package. My understanding is that GBIF is actively working on the capacity to distribute DwC-DPs for download, which they are motivated to do as they were one of the driving forces behind their development. So more to come on this! I enjoyed observing the development and review process and learned a lot about data standard management and governance watching this go through.
Big week for biodiversity informatics!