During the last Content Management Task Force meeting, Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) proposed the idea of a distributed architecture where the single organizations describe themselves and host the description on a web server and the URLs of the files containing the descriptions would be registered in a Registry File. This would allow for the creation of powerful web services based on the harvesting of the description files, eliminating the heavy job of maintaining large databases, which are difficult to update and often contain information that is already covered by other databases. This reduces the risk of duplication of work and brings economy of scale. The creation of web services would be possible thanks to the adoption of a common standard to be used in the descriptions: the Organizations Application Profile proposed by FAO and GFAR (still in draft state and available for comments here: http://www.fao.org/agris/agmes/dtd/org.dtd.txt).