Dear TDWG'ers

At the recent 2006 Conference of TDWG the new structure of Interest Groups and Task Groups was accepted. One of the proposed new Interest Groups was for Agents, which is the term used to cover persons, organisations and software acting in some specific role or roles.

These are generic, in that information about agents is useful in conjunction with many of the other TDWG standards and making this available in a standard way that can be picked up by any of them would be a valuable aid to consistency.

At the moment, there is only one Task Group that may be attached to the AIG and that is the one developing Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD). This emerging standard can already be used to describe organisations, in a "level 1" sort of way by viewing them as "collections of collections". It also acknowledges the strong link between collections and persons by providing hooks to biographical databases which provide rich information about persons and may be based on BiogML or EAC.

Providing information about agents in a standard form, in effect building a directory of organisations and persons engaged in natural history activity, could be one of the objectives of the AIG.

If you are interested in joining (or leading) an Agents Interest Group and helping to define the relationship between agents and the TDWG data standards and ontology then please send me an email at mailto:n.thomson@nhm.ac.uk

With thanks, Neil

------- Neil Thomson Head of Data & Digital Systems The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 5294, Fax: +44 (0)20 7942 5559, Email: n.thomson@nhm.ac.uk http://www.nhm.ac.uk