Expression of continuing interest

[Bryan Heidorn]

Yes. Actually I mean two things. The simple is that there is some data that
just is text and not processable but should still be in a treatment. For
example, Natural History comments or social factors like, "Native Americans
used this tree to construct canoes because they could." or some other more
useful comment.

I also mean that not all character states can be grounded in reality. I agree
with Peter that they _should_ but there is a lot of legacy data out there and
we don;t have the collation rules that were used by the authors to come up
with
the generalities. So we need to support the word "ovate" as a leaf shape
descriptor <leaf_shape>ovate</leaf_shape> or we will not be able to support
legacy data. Even if we do not really know what they meant by "ovate." I think
this can be covered in your standard document and in XML since we can define a
property for the tag to say how we got it. <leaf_shape type=text> or for
"grounded data" <leaf_shape type=collationRule|where-to-find-rule> or if the
leaf shape was for a specimen instance and described with an ellipsoid Fourier
descriptor <leaf_shape type=EFD>e1:0001;e2:0212;e3:0981</leaf_shape>

An application can define the semantics based on the type property (meta-data)
conversely we could make different leaf_shape tags for the different types but
I think that is a bad idea.

cheers,
bryan
At 08:28 AM 7/20/00 +1000, you wrote:
>At 06:58 PM 18/7/00 -0500, Bryan Heidorn wrote:
>
>>I do not see how we can avoid mixing data in a treatment. I'll need to go
back
>>and reread Bob's comments on that. Generally I don't see how we can have a
>>standard that requires all fields to be reduced to finite states. Some
things
>>will just need to be unprocessed (by the computer) text.
>
>You mean like the "Text" character type of DELTA?, or unparsed textual
>notes attached to characters/states/taxa/data items?
>
>Cheers - k
>
--
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  P. Bryan Heidorn    Graduate School of Library and Information Science
  pheidorn at uiuc.edu   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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