This newsgroup might not be quite the correct forum for the following, but as there has been no activity of late, I hope I will be forgiven.

At the end of June, the formation of the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C for short) was announced. So what is it? The I3C's own material states "The I3C's mission is to facilitate and enable data exchange, data management, and knowledge management across the entire life science community by promoting common protocols that ensures interoperability in an open, consistent and robust manner." The "common protocols" are largely XML based. See http://i3c.open-bio.org/ for details.

Unfortunately, the "entire life science community" does not, at least at this stage, appear to include taxonomists. The emphasis is strongly on genomics, with a substantial side interest in drug discovery. Nevertheless, this effort might be worth watching. It includes a number of heavyweights from the IT industry (IBM, Sun, Oracle), along with major players in pharmaceuticals and genomics, so there're a lot of resources to draw from. Whether their efforts might someday extend to include taxonomy, and whether taxonomists can learn from this initiative, remains to be seen. But that mission statement does sound remarkably like that of TDWG...

Eric Zurcher CSIRO Livestock Industries Canberra, ACT Australia E-mail: Eric.Zurcher@pi.csiro.au