Ecode

Ecode is an open, interoperable encoding standard designed to represent ecological and environmental data in a machine-readable form. It provides a common data model and vocabulary to enable sharing and reuse of observations, features, and provenance across sensors, GIS systems, and data repositories.

The standard emerged from a collaboration of researchers, domain scientists, and information technologists in the early 2010s, with formal publication of the first specification in 2012. It has since evolved through community-driven revisions, with major versions released roughly every few years.

Technical features include a hierarchical data model that supports features (locations or regions), observations (measurements), and properties (attributes). Ecode emphasizes the use of controlled vocabularies and persistent identifiers, and supports both human-readable serialization (JSON-LD, XML) and a compact binary encoding for bandwidth-limited contexts.

Adoption and applications: used by environmental monitoring networks, biodiversity databases, climate research initiatives, and government agencies to exchange data with consistent metadata, lineage, and quality flags.

Governance and standards process: maintained by a community working group; ongoing revisions, conformance tests, and a "Ecode-compliant" certification. The standard is often used in conjunction with related standards such as Darwin Core, ISO 19156 (Observations and Measurements), and SensorML.

See also: Darwin Core, Observations and Measurements, SensorML, ISO 19156.