The aim of the Biodiversity Services and Clients Interest Group (BSCI) is to promote improved interoperability of biodiversity web services through common service application programming interface (API) design principles, recognition of the needs of client systems, harmonized and machine-readable service documents, and a joint service registration system for promotion and discovery purposes as well as service monitoring. Over the last 15 years, the biodiversity informatics community underwent a fundamental technological shift from database-driven, human-readable web portals to service infrastructures for machine-to-machine communication. However, many of the new service layers have been designed in isolation and were not conceived as standardised and reliable functional units in a global biodiversity service-oriented infrastructure.

The Interest Group will continuously assess the biodiversity service infrastructure landscape and coordinate a harmonisation process for service APIs and their documentation. An important focus will be the analysis of criteria for service usability in integrating systems (e.g. workflow environments such as Kepler and Taverna), stability and versioning of service APIs, as well as semantic interoperability.

All those interested in these objectives are encouraged to attend this meeting.