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Sharing DwC Data
The Darwin Core standard is useful for sharing data between individual researchers and collections, but at some point you may also wish to contribute your DwC-formatted data to biodiversity aggregators, e.g. iDigBio, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), VertNet, etc. Sharing your data more broadly involves publication and registration.
In the Darwin Core world, "publishing" refers to creating a DwC-A (Darwin Core Archive) package of your data. This allows your data to be provided in a standard, machine-readable format, often via an online access point. That online access point could be anything from your institutional website, to a project/domain-specific portal, to general biodiversity data aggregators like the ones listed above.
Registration is required to make your DwC-A package discoverable, and is a process by which the source of the data (you/your institution) is vetted. Registration is commonly handled by biodiversity data aggregators, in particular by GBIF. Typically, once a data source is registered it is assigned a GUID, which then facilitates an automated validation method for future datasets from the same source.
Many institutions use an instance of GBIF's Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) to publish ad register their data.
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