Biodiversity Informatics is Megascience <B>Biodiversity Informatics is Megascience</B><P> </B><EM><B></B></EM><B>Wouter Los</B><EM><B></B></EM><BR> Zoological Museum Amsterdam, PO Box 94766, NL-1090 GT Amsterdam, The Netherlands<B></B><P> In the field of genetic, species and ecological diversity studies, there is a rapid and increasing expansion of biological informatics. The next decade will bring about new innovations and initiatives in biological informatics. One of the challenges is to make full use of the world's biodiversity databases, which are essential diverse, heterogeneous, and distributed. As the information about biodiversity is a vast domain, the need is to develop tools to get readily available information about Earth's living resources for various user groups. As the Internet will offer increasingly better facilities to transfer huge datasets, the future for global information systems is in the Internet. This will be supported by advanced searching facilities (data mining) and analysing tools. <BR> In 1996, the OECD Megascience Forum established an international working group in Bioinformatics, thus recognising the megascience nature of this subject. One of the recommendations will be to join forces to construct a Global Biodiversity Information Facility. This GBIF is a distributed and virtual facility, growing through a modular approach in the meta-domain of distributed systems. Present and emerging initiatives of a new nature will assist in creating the GBIF. Expert tools and master reference files (such as Species 2000) will contribute to the framework of the GBIF.<BR> The challenges of the meta-domain of GBIF will require new policies from the European Commission and national governments. But also the European scientific institutions and publishers will have to consider their policy, as to the issue of copyrights/owner rights, and charging systems.<P>