At 06:58 PM 18/7/00 -0500, Bryan Heidorn wrote:

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I do not see how we can avoid mixing data in a treatment. I'll need to go back and reread Bob's comments on that. Generally I don't see how we can have a standard that requires all fields to be reduced to finite states. Some

Yes. Actually I mean two things. The simple is that there is some data that just is text and not processable but should still be in a treatment. For example, Natural History comments or social factors like, "Native Americans used this tree to construct canoes because they could." or some other more useful comment. I also mean that not all character states can be grounded in reality. I agree with Peter that they _should_ but there is a lot of legacy data out there and we don;t have the collation rules that were used by the authors to come up with the generalities. So we need to support the word "ovate" as a leaf shape descriptor <leaf_shape>ovate</leaf_shape> or we will not be able to support legacy data. Even if we do not really know what they meant by "ovate." I think this can be covered in your standard document and in XML since we can define a property for the tag to say how we got it. <leaf_shape type=text> or for "grounded data" <leaf_shape type=collationRule|where-to-find-rule> or if the leaf shape was for a specimen instance and described with an ellipsoid Fourier descriptor <leaf_shape type=EFD>e1:0001;e2:0212;e3:0981</leaf_shape> An application can define the semantics based on the type property (meta-data) conversely we could make different leaf_shape tags for the different types but I think that is a bad idea. cheers, bryan At 08:28 AM 7/20/00 +1000, you wrote: things

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will just need to be unprocessed (by the computer) text.

You mean like the "Text" character type of DELTA?, or unparsed textual notes attached to characters/states/taxa/data items?

Cheers - k

-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- P. Bryan Heidorn Graduate School of Library and Information Science pheidorn@uiuc.edu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (V)217/ 244-7792 501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6212 (F)217/ 244-3302 http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~heidorn