The mission of this Research Data Alliance with TDWG is to enhance existing and create new standards for giving attribution for the maintenance, curation, and digitization of physical and digital objects with a special emphasis on biodiversity collections.

Within the 18-month timeline stipulated by RDA for working groups, we will analyse use cases from a variety of disciplines and review existing schemas and vocabularies in order to create the final deliverables: a metadata schema and set of metadata standards to support attribution for curatorial activities. These new standards will be suggested for ratification by TDWG as a community standard via an extension to Darwin Core.

The deliverables of this working group will benefit institutions that maintain collections and individuals who curate them and will lead to:

• Improved recognition of the immense effort required for maintaining, curating, and sharing collections, which is likely to lead to increased funds for these activities
• Increased efficiency in knowledge generation from collections through the proper documentation of corrections and analyses performed
• Increased viability of crowdsourcing as a model for building collaborative research resources
• Increased relevance of existing e-infrastructure that is being stifled by the expert annotation bottleneck

The session at TDWG 2016 will introduce the topic to TDWG members, but will be primarily a working meeting that will focus on:

1. Reviewing the biodiversity use cases and surfacing any additional scenarios
2. Initial brainstorming for schema design and adoption or extension of controlled vocabularies
3. Discussing linking to the Darwin Core standard