Hello
It also appears that there is some confusion between what is included in levels 1 & 2. Level 1, as originally defined, is not intended to include metadata about the publication. To us that seems to include original language and translation/transliteration metadata which, while it is certainly relevant, might better be placed in level 2 with the rafts of other metadata. We can see an argument for inclusion of certain metadata in Level 1, although this goes against taxonomic custom and opens the door to adding lots of metadata to Level 1, which seems inappropriate.
Level 1 should be remain an unconstrained string. Although it does not exactly hurt to have an optional language attribute on it, I think I agree with Anna and Chris in that that start to blur the distinction between Level 1 and 2.
However, if in the case of Literature references we define Level 1 as "any unconstrained form of literature citation acceptable in scientific citations" then the string may include abbreviated or non-abbreviated journal/source information, it may include various other metadata such as "date last seen" for online-references, and it may include free-form translation/transcription/transliteration data such as "Flora of Siberia, Moskau 19XX (in Russian).".
That does bring up the issue of relationship between the two standards. Should one of the uses of Level 2 be the generation of Level 1 citation(s) in various languages which then tie back to metadata in Level 2 about the language used as well as all of the other level 2 metadata?
In the case of references, it would be very useful to define level 2 as sufficiently rich (in structure and detail) to allow the generation of unconstrained reference text according to the various common citation formats - a job software like ReferenceManager or EndNote is commonly used for.
Gregor---------------------------------------------------------- Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn@bba.de) Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Königin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203