Morphological Data Representation

[Mauro J. Cavalcanti]

Steve Shattuck wrote:

> Leigh's comments are good and worth a detailed look.  His
> model/representation/syntax (or whatever you want to call it) of the same
> data I used (see http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccslrd/delta/lep.xml) is exactly the
> kind of thing I had in mind.  Does his representation make more sense than
> the one I proposed?  What are the strengths/weaknesses of our approaches.
> Does one allow us to get to where we want to be?  Again, I don't think the

Shattuck's and Dodd's proposals indeed seem basically identical (with XDELTA
deserving priority, since it has been presented first; it also seems a little
bit more detailed than Shattuck's proposal).

What I miss is an integration of the morphological data representation with the
representation of the taxonomic hierarchy (that has never been properly dealt
with by DELTA) in a single XML format for the purpose of storing and exchanging
taxonomic datasets. Gilmour's "Taxonomic Markup Language"
(http://www.albany.edu/~gilmr/pubxml/ ) could provide a good start in this
direction.

I would appreciate very much any comments in this connection.

Regards,

--
+ - - - - - - - - - - - - Mauro J. Cavalcanti - - - - - - - - - - - - +
| Setor de Paleovertebrados, Departamento de Geologia e Paleontologia |
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