Darwin core

[Stan Blum]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:16:55 +0530, Shubhada Nagarkar
<shubha at BIOINFO.ERNET.IN> wrote:
[...]
>Is there any software which helps to create Darwin Core.

The DarwinCore is used as a data transfer schema, so it is "created" from an
existing database as an export format.  How you create it depends on the
database you exporting from.  Some tools exist to help with this, but none
are completely automatic.

It is also important to realize that the only reason to export data in a
DarwinCore format is for combination with other data sets exported from
similar databases; i.e., to participate in a federation of data providers.
At the moment, the software that enables this sort of distributed query and
on-the-fly data set building, using the DarwinCore, is DiGIR.  ( See
http://digir.net and http://www.gbif.org/DataProviders/HowTo )  The DiGIR
provider software installs on a web server and creates DarwinCore datasets
from your database in response to queries it receives from a DiGIR client or
portal.  A DarwinCore extract is created only as a response to a DiGIR query.

DiGIR can be installed on a Windows and Linux servers, but some familiarity
with server adminstration is necessary and some configuration steps are
manual. I believe some collection database packages, such as Specify and
Biota, either now have, or soon will have, DiGIR providers built into them.

Finally, please be aware that the DiGIR-DarwinCore combination is not the
only way to be a provider in the GBIF network or federation.  The BioCASE
protocol is available and works with the much more extensive ABCD export
format (schema).  Links to BioCASE can be found at the GBIF reference above.

-Stan