Data Standardisation Working Group
Overview
The Data Standardisation Working Group of the International Bio-logging Society aims to fulfill the Society’s objective to “progress standardisation of data protocols used within the bio-logging community, with a view to making databases interoperable”. These standards should support the collection and use of bio-logging data to support research and applied uses. We welcome participation from all sectors, disciplines, career stages and regions.
Activities
Through community consultation during 2017–2024, we have identified a set of key needs for bio-logging data standards, illustrated below (from Davidson, Cagnacci et al., 2025):
Members of this working group have previously helped to propose and demonstrate several potential standards, including De Pooter et al. (2017), Sequeira et al. (2021), van der Kolk et al. (2022), and MPIAB (2024). Moving forward, we acknowledge that the value of data standards relies on wide adoption of standards and ensuring accessibility of standardized data. Adoption will in turn depend on incentives to standardize, curate and publish data, tools to steward long-term access to data that are not public, and sustainable funding streams for these efforts. Our aim is for this working group to offer an international umbrella for coordination.
Resources
COMING SOON!
Members
The current co-chairs of this working group are Sarah Davidson (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany), Peggy Newman (CSIRO, Australia), Francesca Cagnacci (Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy).
We are currently organizing an advisory team of members to organize working group activities and communications. To get in touch, please contact ibls.datastandards@gmail.com.
Contribute
Interested in joining the group or receiving email updates? Contact us at ibls.datastandards@gmail.com.