Field observations & occurrences
Darwin Core
The core vocabulary for occurrence records: what was seen, where, when, and by whom.
Primary sources & specifications
Built on standards researchers already use.
The list below is Clio’s current foundation map. These links point to primary academic papers and normative or authoritative specifications; adoption and export integrations remain work in progress.
Ecological inventories
Humboldt Extension
Sampling effort, protocol, completeness, and inferable absences for traps, tows, transects, and plots.
Biological imaging
REMBI
Sample preparation, acquisition, instrument, and analysis metadata for reusable microscopy data.
Microscopy files
OME Data Model
Machine-readable image dimensions, channels, objectives, and physical pixel metadata, including OME-TIFF and OME-XML.
Cloud-native imaging
OME-NGFF / OME-Zarr
A next-generation format direction for large, multi-resolution biological image collections.
Images & media
Audiovisual Core
TDWG multimedia terms for linking a photograph, scan, or recording to a biodiversity occurrence.
Geology
ABCD + EFG
Geoscience terms for mineralogical, petrological, and palaeontological specimens where Darwin Core alone is not enough.
Water, sequences & eDNA
MIxS
Environmental context for sequence-linked samples: location, depth, environment, and sampling method.
Packaging & publication
EML + DwC-A
Dataset context, methods, coverage, tables, and metadata packaged for a future Darwin Core Archive export.
Collection descriptions
Latimer Core
A TDWG vocabulary for describing whole collections—natural-history drawers, specimen archives, and microscopy sets.
People & physical samples
ORCID + IGSN
Persistent identifiers for contributor credit and retained geological samples; linking and minting are not yet implemented in Clio.
Stewardship
FAIR principles
The cross-cutting direction: data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
Implementation status: Clio’s local D1 schema now contains versioned, bounded projections for the listed record, collection, sequence and imaging standards—including dedicated Latimer Core, MIxS and OME-Zarr structures. A stored projection is not a declaration of full conformance, nor evidence that Clio currently publishes to GBIF, ALA, ENA, the EBI BioImage Archive, GRSciColl or any other repository.
Quality evidence
Standards give a record a shared vocabulary. Review gives it meaning.
Clio’s planned three-tier verification workflow is informed by the citizen-science data-quality literature, including Kosmala et al. (2016) and the GBIF data-quality requirements.
Read the quality review ↗