October 3, 1996

We are all familiar with the fact that TNC has for sometime been building and maintaining the Heritage Database (HDB) concerning Hawaiian fauna and flora, including such valuable information as location of and even numbers of indigenous and sometimes endangered species. in other states, TNC has successfully fulfilled their intended mandate of handing the database off to state organizations who are willing to pay for maintaining it. The State of Hawaii has initially turned down taking the HDB, and given the shortage of funding at the state level this may be understandable. Still, everyone agrees the database represents a valuable resource and a way should be found to maintain and even expand it, perhaps by adding other databases to it to make it an expanded database (EDB) Other questions need investigating concerning the HDB, including development, management and costs associated with a comprehensive use, management and access system.

I have contacted most of you individually and with this letter confirm that a meeting will take place to discuss the future of this and other databases at US Fish & Wildlife headquarters in the Federal building, rm 3108, 300 Ala Moana Bld., in downtown Honolulu from 10 AM-12:30 PM on Tuesday, Oct 8 next. The room will be available from 1:30-3:00 PM as well in the event there is a desire to carry on the discussion after breaking for lunch.

Although Kent Bridges was asked to attend, he is away to the mainland the day of the meeting. He described to me a new system based on an "Eweb concept" which he is involved in developing which will link databases on different continents let alone within a State! It is supposed to take care of problems like lack of trust between data managers, differences in data quality, problems with data control, etc. and which has a capability of mirrorability at other sizes; that is a data set can be kept at a primary site but accessed by a mirror site for retrieval only. Simply throwing a switch can make the mirror site the primary site (this concept is useful for databases residing within unstable governmental units where policy and practice might turn hostile). Access to the E""')" would require a homepage URL which his unit could set up for you. Kent would like to tell us about this system in more detail at our next meeting which will have to be held on a Tuesday or Thursday (he teaches MWF).

Although we have reserved a black of time, we recognize that individuals have busy schedules. It is likely anyway that we will need to schedule follow-up meetings to this one. The tight and busy schedule below will at least give us a chance to begin a dialogue on what needs to address in future meetings. To keep our momentum up and recognizing that October is a busy month especially for BRD and for TNC, I would like to suggest now for your consideration that the second meeting be held on Thursday, Oct. 17 in the afternoon and that we attempt to have Kent there to tell us about his system before proceeding to unfinished business from the first meeting.

Our agenda for the first meeting is ambitious. However it can spill over to a second meeting as suggested above. The first meeting agenda will include but is not limited to:

A list of participants who have indicated a willingness to attend and who is expected to be present is appended. This list includes other invitees who expressed a strong interest but could not attend. We can add others you deem important to the list as we proceed.

Thank you for your attention and time!