- I propose to have 3 XML Namespaces for our different XML vocabularies: o biological descriptions (generalities) o botany o zoology
I'm sure you don't mean to leave out Mycology, Bryology, etc.
Exactly (says a mycologist). Also, what about at least 20 different name spaces for protists, 50 or so for bacteria. Viruses, mycoplasms, viroids, ...
Biological diversity is well beyond our current grasp. We should admit that we do NOT understand it in any way sufficiently. Even what we understand is obscured by terminoly inadequacies or concurrent, but not entirely synonymous terminology. From my own experience, I think that unifying character definition even among fairly closely related groups of a small group of the fungi can be a challenging task.
Richard Pankhurst could probably step in here and explain why it is so difficult to even draw up a core consensus character set for all higher plants (an effort he is concerned with for several years now).
The tendency in this discussion to assume that things like leaf, petiole, veins etc. should be directly coded into the standard worries me. The examples are fine for the purpose of discussion, but I hope that most people agree that the schema independence of DELTA (and principally also NEXUS, although NEXUS leaves most of the definition to free text in a published article) is a big achievement, and I would not like to sacrifice it.
This does not mean that we should not try to unify character schemas, but it definitely should be a separate task. We need a general standard, and an applied standard that acutally uses a defined namespace.
So, I believe we need:
o Character schema definition language, expressed in XML-DTD or better XML-Schema - Researchers working on weird stuff like Tardigrada should not be required to wait until somebody creates a schema for them, but must go ahead and develop their own schema. - DELTA is, in part, such a language.
o Character schema (an applied character definition, that acutally defines names, type, constraints, etc. for a set of characters), expressed in the new Character schema definition language. - The character definition of a DELTA data set is such a schema. - The thing to achieve would be, to express this in such a way that it becomes a usable XML Namespace definition, while still linking into the Character schema definition language! I could then be directly used by XML tools, but it would be developed with added value by the more relevant additional definition in the Character schema definition language! o An application to express item descriptions using these tools. - Example: DELTA ITEM DESCRIPTION.
Thus I envision something like:
+ Character definition language, adding special metainformation to: + Standard XML Namespace definition, which, however, can be used independently
Both together form a character schema of a new standard, which would be used in item descriptions. The item descriptions themselves have two components:
+ A markup language to mark existing (or computer generated) free textual descriptions + A data language, to exactly define the data used, including knowledge management support
See also the separate post "Markup of text descriptions Vs. structured data (GEN)"
Gregor ---------------------------------------------------------- Inst. for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Gregor Hagedorn Net: G.Hagedorn@bba.de Koenigin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203
Often wrong but never in doubt!