Taxonomic hierarchy in SDD

[Steve at]

The full taxonomic hierarchy of the included taxa/items certainly must be
supported by the standard (and it will be addressed after we deal with
simple characters, states and items).  If the creator of the dataset doesn't
think it's important then they can choose to leave it out; if the user of
the data doesn't think it's important then they can ignore it.  This will be
especially important if we intend to support inheritance and compilation up
and down the classification (as has been suggested by several of us).

Jumping the gun a bit, I would think these relationships would be stored
either as a separate nested set of elements with ID's linking to specific
items, or the items themselves would be nested with parent items containing
their children.

Steve Shattuck
CSIRO Entomology
biolink at ento.csiro.au