Biodiversity Collections Index

Natural Collections Descriptions Help

BCI was inspired by the work of TDWG and RAVNS to develop data exchange standard call Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD).

The role of NCD is to enable systems to exchange data about natural history collections. NCD fits between more complex archival standards such as EDS and very high level exchange standards such as Dublin Core.

It became apparent during the development of NCD that a single authority issuing Globally Unique Identifiers for collections would greatly enhance the utility of any data exchange standard and so BCI was instigated as a parallel effort.

BCI is an index not an exhaustive metadata repository and as such does not aim to support all the data fields that are declared by NCD. BCI must also handle data from multiple sources that may not map easily or at all into NCD.

BCI does however support NCD as its data exchange standard. All collections are exposed using a valid subset of the NCD standard. If you click on the RDF link on the top of any collection's page you will see NCD encoded metadata. The data in the index will be gradually moved as close to NCD as possible.

As NCD passes through the TDWG ratification process the parts of NCD that are missing from BCI will be prioritised for future development phases of BCI. Fields will not be added just for the sake of completeness but only when it is known that they will be populated for a significant number of records and are required for well defined BCI use cases. Lessons learned in the development of BCI will be fed into the NCD standardisation process.

None of this precludes the widespread adoption of NCD in its entirety for exchange of richer data than BCI currently holds and the use of BCI identifiers in any such exchanges.

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