I was pleased to be able to entertain a party of five visitors from South Korea yesterday: Seok Young Kim,  Ryu jae wook, Kim Taeho, Kyu S. Oh, and Choi Won-Young.

Several years ago I was involved in the development of the Pan-European Species dictionaries Infrastructure (PESI) – an attempt to build a dictionary of the species names used in Europe. The Korean National Institute of Biological Resources is facing similar challenges in managing species names across multiple taxonomic databases and so sent this team on a fact finding mission to Europe to learn from out triumphs and mistakes. We spent a couple of hours discussing the challenges they face and the things we did in PESI. Hindsight is a very useful thing so I was keen to stress how we might have done things differently!

Korea is a very biodiverse country and the NIBR seems to be doing some interesting work so I hope we will be able to work together more in the future.