Dear All, At the 2004 TDWG meeting in Christchurch NZ, a new subgroup was formed to explore avenues that incorporate observation-based monitoring of biological organisms data into existing federation mechanisms of the bioinformatics community. Our goal is to develop methods that facilitate interoperability with existing metadata standards, external portals, and data harvesting structures, without loosing the inherent value of these data. A potential outcome of this subgroup is to develop a rich description standard for observational and monitoring data. For this to occur the standard must be extensible to allow the incorporation of a diversity of data types. Furthermore, the standard should incorporate variables from more general resource discovery standards (e.g. from Dublin Core or Darwin Core). Background information on the observational data subgroup may be found at: http://www.avianknowledge.net/tdwg At the Christchurch meeting a number of TDWG'ers expressed interest in helping with our efforts to integrate observational data into TDWG, and we will have a subgroup meeting at this year's TDWG meeting in St. Petersburg. For those of you that are able to attend this year's meeting and are interested in our efforts, you are very welcome to attend the subgroup meeting. If you are interested in helping with the observational data subgroup but are unable to attend the St Petersburg meeting, please let me know and I will updated on our efforts. All comments are welcome, Thanks, Steve Kelling Director of Information Sciences Cornell Lab of Ornithology 607-254-2478 (work) 607-342-1029 (cell)