The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded nearly USD 1.5 million to GBIF and TDWG in May 2005 to run a 30-month project to modernise TDWG as a standards development organisation for biodiversity informatics.

TDWG is a centrally important organisation for developing standards for sharing biological data. Organisations such as GBIF are dependent on TDWG for effective standards for locating and sharing bio-data.

Three staff (Lee Belbin, Australia; Roger Hyam, Scotland; Ricardo Pereira, Brazil) were recruited to lead the transformation of TDWG's organisation, processes, infrastructure and standards. This project is now drawing to a close and has been highly successful in achieving all goals set for it.

During the grant period, more than 30 sub-projects were funded, ranging from 'executive-level' documentation and videos to software development activities in support of the TAPIR protocol (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval - which is used by GBIF and others for connecting databases across the Internet).

Over 80 documents have been written during the project, including the new TDWG constitution structure and processes, the master standards specification and scores of recommendations and reports. Most of these documents can be found at http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tip.

The new TDWG-Biodiversity Information Standards web infrastructure includes the website, Twiki, The Open Journal System (for the proceedings of TDWG, standards and group charters tracks), Mailman, a blog, and online registration and conference support. Except for Mailman, all applications have the same 'look and feel' and require a single log-in. TDWG now has over 550 registered users.

One of the most significant outcomes from the project, reported at the recent annual TDWG conference, was the new standards architecture. There were also a number of presentations about the three components of the architecture: Ontologies, Life Science Identifiers and Transfer Protocols. The Proceedings of TDWG includes abstracts for all presentations, posters and computer demonstrations at the conference.

Probably the most enabling component of the architecture is the deployment of LSIDs . These globally unique identifiers make use of ontologies, and therefore usher the "semantic web" into the biodiversity information-sharing community. The project gathered and developed LSID support tools, drafted a range of support documents including a standards specification (Applicability Statement) and supported more than 10 subprojects to advance the deployment of LSIDs. At this time, LSIDs have been deployed by IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank, CATE (Creating a Taxonomic E-Science), and are in process at the Catalogue of Life.

During the past year, TDWG has signed an MoU with the Open Geospatial Consortium, and attracted liaisons or membership from a range of groups and users. These include a (group on invasive species), the IUCN, Conservation Commons, the International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network, and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL).