Why aren't we trying to hook us onto this bandwagon? I think we do have a real strong case with our systematics to make to be included in any of such a system! Why just be passive? Why not draft a little memo to get in touch with them, explaining what we do, how we could complement their efforts. If they are in drug recovery, a good systematics is, or will become a very important tool for them, as well as easily accessible description of taxa, synonymies, distribution patterns and models.

Why be shy - we all think, we are important - so confess and come out!

donat agosti antbase.org

----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Zurcher Eric.Zurcher@PI.CSIRO.AU To: TDWG-SDD@USOBI.ORG Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 5:45 AM Subject: Announcement of the I3C (but where are the taxonomists?)

...

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: >