Darwin Core namespace policy

Title

Darwin Core namespace policy

Date version issued

2026-10-13

Date created

2009-02-12

Part of TDWG Standard

http://www.tdwg.org/standards/450

This version

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/2026-10-13

Latest version

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/

Previous version

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/2023-09-13

Abstract

All terms defined by Darwin Core must be assigned a unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). For convenience, the term URIs assigned and managed by Darwin Core are grouped into collections known as Darwin Core namespaces. Darwin Core also uses terms from namespaces maintained by other standards; those borrowed namespaces are not governed by this policy. This document describes how term URIs are allocated by the Darwin Core Maintenance Group and the policies associated with Darwin Core namespaces.

Contributors

John Wieczorek (Rauthiflor LLC, Global Biodiversity Information Facility), Markus Döring (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), Renato De Giovanni (Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental), Tim Robertson (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), Dave Vieglais (KU Natural History Museum), Gail Kampmeier (Illinois Natural History Survey)

Creator

Darwin Core Maintenance Group

Bibliographic citation

Darwin Core Maintenance Group. 2026. Darwin Core namespace policy. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/2026-10-13

1 Introduction

This document and the policies contained herein are modeled on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Namespace Policy. All terms defined by Darwin Core must be identified with a unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). For convenience, the term URIs assigned and managed by Darwin Core are grouped into collections known as Darwin Core namespaces. Darwin Core also uses terms from namespaces maintained by other standards; those borrowed namespaces are not governed by this policy. This document describes the policies associated with Darwin Core namespaces and how term URIs are allocated by the Darwin Core Maintenance Group.

1.1 Status of the content of this document

All sections of this document are normative.

1.2 Audience

This document is targeted toward those who want to make changes to the Darwin Core, either by refining terms that already exist or by adding new terms to increase the capabilities of the standard.

2 Namespace URIs

The Darwin Core namespace URI for general Darwin Core terms is:

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/

The Darwin Core namespace URI for corresponding terms intended to have IRI values is:

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/iri/

The Darwin Core namespace URI for terms originating in the Chronometric Age vocabulary is:

http://rs.tdwg.org/chrono/terms/

The Darwin Core namespace URI for corresponding Chronometric Age terms intended to have IRI values is:

http://rs.tdwg.org/chrono/iri/

The Darwin Core namespace URI for terms originating in the Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is:

http://rs.tdwg.org/eco/terms/

The Darwin Core namespace URI for corresponding Humboldt terms intended to have IRI values is:

http://rs.tdwg.org/eco/iri/

The term identifier for the current (recommended) version of a term is a URI based on the namespace and the term name without version information. Some example Darwin Core term identifiers follow:

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/scientificName

is the Darwin Core term identifier for the scientificName property, while

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/MachineObservation

is the Darwin Core term identifier for the MachineObservation class.

All Darwin Core identifiers will dereference to a Darwin Core term declaration for the identified term.

3 Term change policy

This section has been superseded by the Vocabulary Maintenance Specification.

4 Persistence policy

TDWG recognizes that people and applications depend on the persistence of formal documents and machine processable schemas that have been made publicly available. In particular, the stability of Darwin Core term URIs and Darwin Core namespace URIs is critical to interoperability over time. Thus, the wide promulgation of this set of URIs dictates that they be maintained to support legacy applications that have adopted them.