The InterParty project is funded under the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme (IST), to design and specify a network to support interoperability of party identification (for both natural and corporate names) across different domains. InterParty builds on the work of the <indecs> project, one of whose deliverables was a specification for a Directory of Parties. InterParty is not proposed as a replacement for existing schemes for the identification of participants in the intellectual property domain (e.g. national library name authority files or systems oriented towards the needs of rights licensing) but as a means of effecting their interoperation.