Special states: What term to use instead?

Gregor Hagedorn G.Hagedorn at BBA.DE
Thu Aug 28 12:40:18 CEST 2003


Steve Shattuck in March responded with a long and detailed criticism
of my Special States proposal/Brazil minutes mix, for which I am very
grateful. I currently try to revise the information.

One important point Steve raised was that the term "Special States"
is very confusing because, although they are documenting knowledge
management metadata in the object description, they are not
terminological states in the character definition.

I was never happy with "special states", but neither in Brazil nor in
Paris we found a better name. The current options are:

<li>Management states (not "internal" data management)</li>
<li>Data scoring</li>
<li>Status states</li>
<li>Status flag</li>
<li>Data entry status</li>
<li>Control states</li>
<li>Special states</li>
<li>Completeness states</li>
<li>Incompleteness states</li>
<li>Completion states</li>
<li>Pseudo character values (used e.&nbsp;g. by L.&nbsp;Dodds in
XDELTA proposal)</li>
<li>Replacement values</li>
<li>Meta states ("meta ..." was considered too unspecific, being only
a relative statement)</li>
<li>Missing data indicators</li>
<li>Missing data flags</li>
<li>Null states</li>
<li>Null values</li>
<li>Knowledge constants/values/flags</li>


"Data entry status flags" seems appropriate, but awfully long.

"Knowledge management state" seems to be a bit too general, because
it is only part of Kn.man.

"Missing data flags"  can easily be misunderstood as "missing data-
flags" rather than "missing-data flags"


Has anybody a bright idea?
----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Koenigin-Luise-Str. 19          Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203

Often wrong but never in doubt!




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