The International Plant Names Index (IPNI: www.ipni.org) serves as a critical reference to taxonomists on the status of names, and associated objective bibliographical details of all seed plants, ferns and fern allies. IPNI is a compilation of three data sources: the Index Kewensis (IK), the Gray Card Index (GCI), and the Australian Plant Names Index (APNI). This is a partnership between three contributing institutions, The Royal Botanic Gardens, KEW, the Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium, which began in 1998. Today, our user community has broadened and there is increased demand for our authoritative index. The success of IPNI also raises challenges for the internal management of the data across the partners. Further, there is an urgent need to create a single subjective consensus synonymy of the plants of the world. This is a serious challenge that is achievable through a marriage of technology and taxonomic expertise. Many routes can be taken to achieve this marriage and thus we seek the feedback from our community of plant taxonomists, biologists, informaticians, IT professionals, and other potential users towards developing a new platform for IPNI.

Moving forward with IPNI requires addressing both internal issues such as organization of the datasets that will combine to produce the Index and external issues such as interfaces and services for the user community. We have begun discussing how to address the needs of participants and the user community, and this has raised numerous issues . The three current partners, and potentially others, must be able to manage their regional datasets using their current database infrastructure while seamlessly contributing a subset of the information they manage to this cohesive global project. We also need to insure that taxonomic vetting can be easily managed by both internal nomenclatural experts and by the greater pool of taxonomic experts in the community without one serving as a bottleneck for the other. A variety of user community standards, protocols, and tools may relate to IPNI and its relationships with the community and have significant potential to assist IPNI in the management and quality control of its data. Community standards and tools are also clearly the means by which IPNI should employ to interact with its users. Elements of the user interaction include a web portal that provides an interface to query the Index, both directly through the IPNI website, indirectly through web services using standards such as Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs), and access to static copies of the data for local use. The greatest challenge is to provide the appropriate infrastructure that would scale to the user community level.