SEEK Project and TDWG-SDD

[Julian H]

At 10:44 AM 4/15/2004, you wrote:
>single discussion, but it struck me that TDWG-SDD has an opportunity to
>have much broader acceptance and support if your schema was not designed
>as a single data object--to contain both the metadata about the package
>(or work or whatever you refer to it as) *and* the descriptive data that
>describe the individual concepts.

Another novice (pre-novice) here, are you specifically referring to
separating out taxonomic concept information (metadata) from the
descriptive data?


>If the taxa/concepts had their own schemas and were linked to the
>package metadata with a GUID, maybe a DOI or some other globally unique
>identifier, then the XML concept data sets could be used for other
>systems like concept based classification or database management
>systems.

Could you write this sentence with a few more words?  I'm want to be sure I
get the concept.

The overhead for the traditional diagnostic identification software
>makers would be that the XML parts would need to assembled for the
>various applications that use the data and there would be the potential
>risk that SDD data sets would be incomplete, if there were some careless
>file management.

What parts could get lost? the taxonomic parts?


>  But presumably you guys are thinking about a registry
>or distributed federation of these data sets anyway, where they would be
>archived and served intact from a trusted source.

Um, now I am really lost, amplify please? What does this have to do with
incomplete SDD data sets?  More on dataset archives in the next email.



>I also understand that data sets of diagnostic identification
>information are far from complete descriptions of concepts in either a
>taxonomic or phylogenetic sense, but if the SDD concept schema could
>accommodate additional characters, then the opportunity would be there
>for other people to use SDD for other kinds of systems.  The UI of
>diagnostic key programs would likely not need to use or display DNA
>sequences for interactive identification, but no harm done, they could
>just ignore fields of no use to the program at hand.


Ok, now we are getting to something I know about.  See the next email for
some comments on this...

Julian



Julian Humphries
DigiMorph.Org
Geological Sciences
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
512-471-3275