4.2 Structuring your tabular data

A common way of storing biodiversity data is in tables. However, simply entering the data into a spreadsheet does often not adhere to the strict requirements of tabular data, which has the following characteristics:

• Structured in rows and columns

• A row contains information about a single entity (e.g., a person’s name, age, or occupation), whilst a single column describes the same property of each entity (e.g., the names of all persons)

• Rectangular shape, in which each row has the same number of columns and each column the same number of rows

• Cells in a row/column can be left empty

For a more extensive and formal description of tabular data, see W3C’s tabular data model.

To standardise the data and make it reusable to others and to follow the remaining steps of this guide, it is a necessary prerequisite that data that is meant to be tabular follows the aforementioned characteristics. If not, reshape your data accordingly.

If your data consists of multiple tables, the relationships between these tables should be made clear. This can be done either by describing it in a README file (see section 4.1) or, if your data is already in a standard format, in a more standardised way, such as the meta.xml file described here.