Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, The University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AS, UK
Vernon Heywood and I organised the first meeting of TDWG in July 1985, hosted by Gilbert Bocquet at the Conservatoire et Jardins Botaniques, Geneva. Our purpose was to agree data exchange standards between stand-alone databases, for instance between ILDIS, ESFDS and the Geneva herbarium, for this was before the Internet and the Web had reached us. Yet the mysterious ‘Blue Skies’ project appeared on the Agenda from the very first discussion.
Each year saw new discussion and wider participation, with memorable working meetings, for instance in Canberra, Australia and Xalapa, Mexico. TDWG started among botanists, but affiliation with IUBS brought pressures and then real participation by zoologists and microbiologists alike. A number of the early ‘standards’ were immediate successes (Geography, Index Herbariorum), some failed (Plant Uses), and yet others took longer to stabilise (Names, Occurrence Status). The underlying needs for data modelling and interoperability among our knowledge sets grew ever more pressing as did thoughts on possible Blue Skies aggregation projects.
For many the 1990 Delphi meeting in Greece, funded by the EC and NSF, was the turning point. Designs for a Global Plant Species Information System was planned as a design study, but the final day of the meeting was hijacked by activists who wanted to get started. The IOPI Global Plant Checklist, establishing Species 2000, and participation in the OECD GBIF working party followed rapidly as this core community saw the excitement and potential for interoperable and distributed systems. Used on a continental and global scale these systems might aggregate knowledge on the world’s biodiversity and bring it to every biologist’s desktop.
At twenty TDWG, already the parent of so many initiatives, has matured to become a core component of the international biodiversity informatics community, bringing us modelling, standards, and interoperability: no more can it to be dismissed as a mere travelling tea-party!