Darwin Core is a standard maintained by the Darwin Core Maintenance Interest Group. It includes a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing identifiers, labels, and definitions. Darwin Core is primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information.

The follwing namespaces belong to Darwin Core:

1. dwc: (IRI http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/) The Darwin Core namespace URI for the collection of general Darwin Core properties, classes, and encoding schemes
2. dwciri: (IRI http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/iri/) The Darwin Core namespace URI for the collection of Darwin Core properties expected to have IRI values
3. dc: (IRI http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/) The Darwin Core namespace URI for the collection of general Dublin Core properties, classes, and encoding schemes
4. dcterms: (IRI http://purl.org/dc/terms/) The Darwin Core namespace URI for the collection of Dublin Core properties expected to have IRI values