Van Guelpen

Biodiversity informatics, the sharing of biological data, is based on specimens and standards. Specimens are costly to collect. Their value is maximized through the use of authoritative standards at each stage of biodiversity informatics: identification, classification, archiving, digitizing, data transformation for online accessibility, and metadata development. The Atlantic Reference Centre (ARC), a museum of Canadian Atlantic organisms and source of biodiversity information, employs standards at all stages of biodiversity informatics.