As part of the Biodiversity Information System on Nature and Landscapes (SINP), the French National Natural History Museum has been appointed to develop a biodiversity data exchange standard by the French ministry in charge of ecology. The objective of this standard is to share marine and terrestrial data on French biodiversity at the national level (mainland and overseas region) to meet national and European requirements (e.g. the European Directive establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community, INSPIRE).

The SINP standard was developed by a dedicated working group, representative of biodiversity stakeholders in France, and was this year submitted to a major overhaul. This standard focuses on core attributes that characterize taxon occurrences. Interoperability at the international level was achieved by being consistent with the Darwin Core standard and the INSPIRE European directive on geographical data.

The presentation will deal with: how the new standard version for taxon occurrence allows for more information than just a simple taxon occurrence, and on what grounds. It will show how the standard was tailored to tackle the users’ needs, which are very diverse, in accordance with the decisions made regarding data exchange with GBIF for an acceptable standardization effort. It will also show how that standard was mapped to the Event core extension of the Darwin Core in order to ensure interoperability as much as possible.

SINP standards are more restrictive than the Darwin Core format and the INSPIRE formats, and some of the issues we encountered depend on the direction of data flow (toward SINP or toward an exterior standard). These issues include absence of a corresponding term, and terms that do not correspond exactly, but only for certain elements. Our presentation will will show how mapping was done to ensure correct data transfer.