GBIF is pleased to report the successful ratification of TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval (TAPIR) as a TDWG standard. TAPIR is one of the protocols used by the GBIF network and a version is included in the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit.

TAPIR specifies a standardised, 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. It combines and extends features of the BioCASe (http://www.biocase.org/products/protocols/) and DiGIR (http://digir.net/) protocols to create a generic means of communication between client applications and Internet data providers.
 
More information on TAPIR can be found at http://www.tdwg.org/standards/449/.