Darwin Core Archives

In a presentation I gave not so long ago (Building Highways in the Informatics Landscape) I suggested that Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) was the lingua franca of biodiversity informatics. A position that I still stand by. However it's a lingua franca with different dialects - and implementation is not quite as simple as it perhaps could (should?) be. In a recent paper (Linking multiple biodiversity informatics platforms with Darwin Core Archives) in the new Biodiversity Data Journal I, along with Simon Rycroft and Vince Smith, set out some of the challenges in making a 'several dialects' DwC-A that satisfies the needs of all current DwC-A consumers of the Scratchpad project.