Observed · Verified · Archived

An open museum for the living and mineral world.

Clio Online Museum is a place where citizens and academics can work side by side: contributing observations, images, samples, and careful identifications across biology, geology, freshwater, saltwater, and microscopy.

  • Birds
  • Insects
  • Plants
  • Fungi
  • Marine life
  • Microscopy
  • Geology

Our promise

Useful to the person who found it, and to the science that comes after.

Clio is pre-launch. The commitments below are the standard we are building toward, and we will mark each capability as it becomes real.

To contributors

Your name, licence, original submission, and identification history stay attached to your work. Contributions remain visible and free to view.

The contributor promise →

To science

Fields are designed around published vocabularies, with three visible verification tiers and an audit trail for how a record changes.

The standards →

To honesty

We will say what is planned, what is in testing, and what is live. We do not borrow the credibility of institutions that have not endorsed Clio.

The honesty promise →

How it will work

One observation, held with its context.

The first foundation is a simple record shape: a shared event core, with domain extensions for the thing observed and the evidence attached to it.

01

Observe and submit

Bring a field sighting, specimen, rock, water sample, photograph, or micrograph with where, when, and how it was made.

02

Review in public

Records carry a visible status: unverified, community-verified, or expert-verified. The status describes the record; it does not replace evidence.

Community-verified
03

Make it citable

Local identity and evidence foundations exist in source; deployment, dataset DOI registration, and external anchoring remain planned and gated.

Foundations

Standards are part of the record, not an export trick.

Clio’s planned data model uses Darwin Core for observations, REMBI and OME for biological imaging, ABCD-EFG for geology, and EML/DwC-A for dataset context and packaging.

Explore the standards