STICHTING INTERNATIONAL WORKING GROUP ON TAXONOMIC DATABASE

Their core work

This is TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards), the international body that develops and maintains open data standards for biological collections and taxonomy — the same standards that underpin global biodiversity databases like GBIF, iDigBio, and DiSSCo. Their core contribution to any consortium is standards expertise: they define how species names, occurrence records, and specimen data are structured so that collections from 200 institutions across 40 countries can actually talk to each other. In EU projects they act as the authoritative voice on data interoperability, ensuring that digitised natural history collections and genomic datasets are structured in a way that makes them reusable, citable, and linkable across platforms. Without organisations like TDWG, biodiversity data from European research infrastructures would exist in silos — their work is what makes cross-institutional data analysis possible.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their two projects show a clear progression from physical infrastructure to semantic interoperability. SYNTHESYS+ (2019) centred on digitising physical natural history collections — getting specimens into digital form using consistent taxonomy and metadata. BiCIKL (2021) moved the frontier forward: now that collections are digital, the challenge is linking them — connecting taxon names to genomic sequences, literature, and occurrence records via linked open data and a biodiversity knowledge graph. The trajectory points toward FAIR data and open science as the dominant frame, with TDWG increasingly positioned as a standards authority enabling machine-readable, reproducible biodiversity research rather than just a taxonomy working group.

TDWG is moving from defining how data is named to defining how data is connected — future collaborations will likely focus on semantic web technologies, FAIR data pipelines, and cross-domain data integration for biodiversity and environmental research.

How they like to work

TDWG joins as a specialist contributor, never as coordinator — consistent across both projects. Despite coordinating zero projects, they connect with a remarkably wide network: 41 partners across 19 countries from just two participations, indicating they are sought-after as a standards authority that large infrastructure consortia want at the table. They are not a delivery organisation; they provide the normative framework that makes everyone else's data usable.

With 41 unique partners across 19 countries from only two projects, TDWG operates inside some of the largest biodiversity research infrastructure consortia in Europe, including DiSSCo and SYNTHESYS+. Their network is European in governance but global in scope, connecting natural history museums, research institutes, and informatics platforms across the continent.

What sets them apart

TDWG is not a research group that does biodiversity science — they are the standards body that makes biodiversity science reproducible and reusable at scale. No other organisation in a typical H2020 consortium holds this specific mandate: they can formally endorse or deprecate data exchange standards that the entire global biodiversity informatics community relies on. For any consortium building a biodiversity data platform or natural history infrastructure, TDWG's participation signals to reviewers and users that the data outputs will meet international interoperability standards.

Highlights from their portfolio

• BiCIKL
  The most technically advanced of their two projects, BiCIKL directly applies TDWG's standards expertise to build a cross-domain biodiversity knowledge graph linking taxonomy, genomics, literature, and collections — and received the higher EC contribution (EUR 11,250).
• SYNTHESYS PLUS
  Part of the DiSSCo/ESFRI initiative to build Europe's distributed natural history collection infrastructure, placing TDWG inside one of the flagship biodiversity research infrastructure projects of the H2020 era.