dwcready

Turn the file you have into a Darwin Core Archive

Publishing occurrence records to GBIF means mapping your columns to Darwin Core, building an archive, and usually learning what was wrong only after it has been ingested. We map what we can confirm from your values, build the archive, and list what we refused to interpret — before you submit.

Drop your file here or click to choose  ·  CSV, TSV, Excel, JSON, PDF, or zip

Free until 1 September  ·  no account  ·  your records are discarded after the check — we keep the column mapping, never the rows.
See a real sample report — a 5,271-record government waterfowl survey, with the archive, the questions and the findings, if you would rather look before uploading.

How this differs from GBIF's validator

GBIF's validator checks a Darwin Core Archive you have already built. It reports what is wrong with it; it does not map your columns and it does not produce the archive. If you do not have an archive yet, there is nothing for it to validate.

We start from the file you actually have — a spreadsheet, a database export, a workbook — confirm each column against its own values rather than its header, and refuse anything genuinely ambiguous instead of guessing. A column named latitude holding longitudes is a real failure mode, and a name match cannot see it.

And the two reports do not overlap. We tested a set of 5,064 records that had already been published to GBIF — so it had already passed their pipeline. GBIF's own vocabulary flagged nothing on it. Our audit returned 4,268 findings, and only 31.7% of the records came back clean. Not because GBIF is wrong: their validator answers “will this load”, and there is no code in their vocabulary for most of what we report. The sample report below is the same story on a different file — a well-made government survey where everything maps, the archive builds, and we still had 503 records to tell you about.

We do not score you

This field is full of invented certifications, self-declared badges and scores whose methodology nobody publishes. We do not issue one. There is no grade, no rating and no seal — because a grade is a scale we would have to invent, and you would have no way to check it.

What you get instead is factual: every finding names the rule it applied and the source that rule comes from, findings in the receiving body’s own vocabulary are counted separately from ours and labelled as ours, and anything we could not settle from your values is refused rather than guessed. A finding is a statement about your record, never about the world.

How we recommend using it

  1. Read what we refused first. For every column we could not interpret you get one line naming the column, what we found in its values, and why we stopped — for example “sex: nominated, but only 5 of 8 values are in the vocabulary — refused”. Expect a handful of lines, not hundreds: each one is a decision about a whole column. Every refusal carries a code — all 63, with what each one means.
  2. Answer the questions we ask. We only ask when two columns are genuinely ambiguous and only you can settle it. Your answers are applied to your own results.
  3. Run the archive through GBIF's validator before you publish. We do not replace that step and do not claim to.