The TDWG Executive Committee has approved the adoption of TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval (TAPIR) - http://www.tdwg.org/standards/449/ as a TDWG standard.

The committee acknowledges the excellent work of the TAPIR Task Group (http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tapir/) and particularly the leadership of Renato De Giovanni. Renato was assisted in writing the standards document by the late Charles Copp. TAPIR represents only one of many areas of Biodiversity informatics where the interest, enthusiasm and support of Charles is appreciated and valued. Thank you Charles.

The TDWG Executive Committee appreciates the work of those who have contributed significantly to the development of TAPIR. In addition to Renato, these include Markus Döring, Anton Güntsch, Dave Vieglais, Donald Hobern, Franck Theeten, Javier de la Torre, John Wieczorek, Kevin Richards, Robert Gales, Roger Hyam, Stanley Blum and Steven Perry.

The committee also greatly appreciates the work that Piers Higgs has done as the Review Manager for TAPIR.

TAPIR specifies a standardized, HTTP transmittable, XML-based request and response protocol for accessing structured data that may be stored on multiple distributed databases in varied physical and logical structures.

TAPIR combines and extends features of the BioCASe http://www.biocase.org/products/protocols/ and DiGIRhttp://digir.net/ protocols to create a generic means of communication between client applications and Internet data providers.

Congratulations to the TAPIR team and many others who have contributed to the standard!

Lee Belbin TDWG Secretariat

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