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The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Darwin Core (DwC) Standard (http://www.tdwg.org/standards/450/) is a vocabulary for expressing data about biodiversity-related resources (Wieczorek et al. 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029715). The DwC standard includes best-practice guides that describe how its terms should be used to transmit data in forms such as fielded text and XML. A new guide describing how DwC terms should be used in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been submitted for inclusion in the standard. We describe the motivation for creating this guide, problems associated with adapting DwC for use in RDF, and the solutions to those problems as outlined in the guide. The problems include use of identifiers, differentiating between literal and URI-reference objects, and use of DwC classes in type declarations. We also discuss the limitations of the guide and what may be required beyond the guide to facilitate the integration of Darwin Core as part of a more semantically rich framework for describing biodiversity resources using RDF.