SDD standard - kinds of description

[Kevin Thiele]

At 11:56 PM 18/7/00 -0300, Bob Allkin wrote:

>Kevin
>your document makes interesting reading.  Further to my earlier email on
>purpose  I see how morphological descriptive data (such as DELTA handles -
>which may well be the primary aim) would fit within your described format.
>
>IF your aim were for this format also to serve for:
>
>1) description of distribution (a hierarchical descriptor - with attributes
>attached to each substate such as native/introduced/etc)
>
>2) description of use [e.g. taxon- plantpart(eg leaf) - forwhom (eg
>children) - forwhat (eg sorethroat) - how (eg infusion)]
>
>3) description of ecology - requiring links between two "descriptors" (eg.
>plant A is a tree at altitude X BUT plant A is a bush at altitude Y)
>
>    then Im less clear how these would be accomodated.  Is there elsewhere a
>set of descriptor/state structures that I could see?

You're right that the structure at the moment does not accommodate some
data types well. It uses the standard structure of a character list where
each character has a list of states and taxa are scored for those states.
Distribution data particularly could use a more sophisticated approach -
sometimes we can fit distribution into this (e.g. Character = "Which
continent?" States = "Australia", "Antarctica" etc.) But can we do better?

Can you suggest a way to accommodate your suggestions?