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With the development of Semantic Web technologies, a consistent way to express Darwin Core (DwC) data in RDF is needed.  Any such encoding method must meet the requirements for GUID resolution (as expressed in the TDWG applicability guide), and be able to share and aggregate diverse kinds of biodiversity metadata in the Linked Open Data universe. Stimulated by the tdwg-content mailing list discussions of Fall 2010, we developed an ontology as a candidate for general usage, based on Darwin Core terms, called Darwin-SW (see http://code.google.com/p/darwin-sw/).  Darwin-SW uses existing DwC terms for classes and data properties whenever possible.  In the ontology, we sought to embody relationships among classes based on our perception of the community consensus of what the classes represent and how they are related to each other, as expressed in posts to the tdwg-content list.  Each class is documented carefully on the project wiki with hyperlinked references to specific tdwg-content posts.  In this talk, we will review the six pre-existing core Classes (dwc:Event, dwc:Identification, dwc:Occurrence, dwc:Taxon, dcterms:Location, foaf:Person) and introduce the two new core classes (dsw:IndividualOrganism, dsw:Token) and linking predicates. We will then describe two examples of active use of the Darwin-SW ontology.