Catalogue of Life (COL) is a collaboration bringing together the effort and contributions of taxonomists and informaticians from around the world. COL aims to address the needs of researchers, policy-makers, environmental managers and the wider public for a consistent and up-to-date listing of all the world’s known species. COL also supports those who need to manage their own taxonomic information and species lists.
COL, in partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), maintains COL ChecklistBank, a repository for taxonomic datasets of various kinds that allows users to publish, discover, use and manage such lists in a variety of formats.
COL manages several github repositories within the Catalogue of Life organisation which are responsible for specific tasks. Please check the individual repositories and their issue management for more details:
- data: a data repository that is used for tracking issues and working with data in the COL Checklist.
- coldp: Catalogue of Life Data Package specification of a richer & recommended exchange format for Catalogue of Life and ChecklistBank, replacing DwC-A and the CoL submission format (ACEF).
- backend: the Java backend with various Maven modules that primarily provide standalone JSON webservices as shaded jars using the Dropwizard framework
- checklistbank: repository containing all frontend code written in React on top of the API services.
- portal: the public facing website for Catalogue of Life built using Jekyll