The rate of species extinction has lent increasing urgency to the description of new species, but in this supposedly networked “big data” era the process of cataloging the rich tapestry of life has changed little since the time of Linnaeus.

Lead by researchers at the University of Oxford, a group of more than 30 scientific organizations around the globe, have worked to produce a common standard that will make possible the consistent description of enormous and radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies.