gbif
Support ColDP archive output format
The Catalogue of Life has developed a new data format, the Catalogue of Life Data Package (ColDP) which is an evolution from Darwin Core Archives, also using primarily CSV or TSV data files, but is more relational and avoids the star schema traps especially for literature references.
ColDP is the recommended format for publishing taxonomic and nomenclatural data and is expected to replace DwC-A in many cases. Currently ColDP archives are mostly generated by custom scripts. It would be great to be able to use the IPT in the taxonomic community.
@mdoering To help in our planning, is this a speculative request or do COL have IPT users that need this now please?
COL has a bottleneck by manually packing up ColDP with custom scripts for most sources. @gdower is doing most of this work, maybe he wants to comment. Many things can be accomplished with DwC-A already, but ColDP offers more and e.g. ZooBank would be easily available as ColDP if its IPT could (auto) publish it. It is not blocking COL, but it would definitely accelerate it considerably. ColDP version1 is now also close to be released as a stable version to work against (it has seen only minor changes since last autumn)
For authoritative checklist like VASCAN would a ColDP output format in addition to the DwC-A output format help CoL in harvesting such sources?
All the core information can be passed via DwC-A, so it is not essential to use ColDP. Here is a comparison: https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/coldp#format-comparison
ColDP especially improves handling of bibliographic references (they are normalised and structured). In addition it allows to share extras like species estimates, name relations, species interactions and provides a more citation oriented and COL targeted metadata model.
The blocker for using VASCAN or any other regional list right now is that the COL assembly code requires global coverage of taxonomic groups. This will be the focus of our next milestone after summer.