My thanks go to the Sloane Foundation for making this meeting possible, but I also want to say a special thank-you to Robyn Cowan.  Although several people were on the scientific committee which put together the program, Robyn really did most of the work and we should all be grateful to her for her time and the great skill she put into this.
	I will talk about the kind of data which are needed when DNA barcoding becomes more widely used, in the context of the ‘biological basis’ or biological realilty that presents itself to us/that we are faced with, which we have to take into account; based on which we have to chose the kind of data we want to generate.
	My main message will be that the biological factors are very favorable for DNA barcoding to work extremely well, and that a DNA based system using short sequences is a very powerful tool in taxonomy.