The Catalogue of Life Data Package - A new format for exchanging nomenclatural and taxonomic information

The Catalogue of Life Data Package (COLDP) format was developed to overcome limitations existing in currently used formats for sharing taxonomic information, namely Darwin Core Archives (DwC-A) and the Catalogue of Life (CoL) submission format also known as the Annual Checklist Exchange Format (ACEF). The tabular text based format, strongly influenced by DwC-A and ACEF, was designed to work with the Frictionless Data Package specification, but includes support for other well established formats like BibTeX and CSL-JSON for literature citations. It is the recommended exchange format for data published to, and downloaded from, the CoL Clearinghouse