The next PICES Annual Meeting (PICES-2013) will be held from October 11-20, 2013, in Nanaimo, Canada. The overall theme for PICES-2013 will be “Communicating forecasts, uncertainty and consequences of ecosystem change”, and we are now preparing the announcement and the website for this meeting. One of the workshops approved for PICES-2013 is a 1-day TCODE workshop on “Tools, approaches and challenges for accessing and integrating distributed datasets” to held on Friday, October 11 (the workshop description is included below). ------------------------------------------------- W4 Tools, approaches and challenges for accessing and integrating distributed datasets (1-day TCODE Workshop) Convenors: Lynn deWitt (USA), Roy Mendelssohn (USA) and Toru Suzuki (Japan) Most of PICES’ data sharing activities have been on the server side: gathering and standardizing metadata and developing a web portal based on GeoNetwork software. These tools aim to provide web browser access to data. The tools are useful because distributed data require the efficiencies of machine to machine access to data that are distributed across multiple sites. However, users may prefer to access data using their particular client of choice. It may be a browser, but it might also include anything from shell scripts to python or java programs to application extensions or libraries that allow direct access to the data from within the user\'s favourite application. This workshop will examine new and existing client-side solutions that are working to make the use of distributed data services simple and invisible to the user. Live demonstrations are encouraged. --------------------------------------------------