How nice it would have been if http://www.tdwg.org/schemas/tcs/1.01 had all its data types, especially the ComplexTypes, at the top level, and in a separate file, and the rest would use mainly those types to define a preferred TCS data set structure. Then there would have been \the/ TCS vocabulary, and \a/ TCS exchange structure and you could reuse and extend the Types. That's what we did in SDD, though it leads to the need for lots of key, keyref use to put contextual restrictions on the particular exchange structure. People find it hard to understand, and complain that you have introduced needless complexity.(But Computer Science grad students admire it. :-) ). I've fallen out of love with XML-Schema except for the huge set of high quality tools around, and the useful JAXB databinding framework now fully embedded in Java. And its pretty good for specifying software configuration.
Bob Morris
Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Paul Murray pmurray@anbg.gov.au wrote:
On 25/11/2010, at 12:03 PM, Tony.Rees@csiro.au Tony.Rees@csiro.au wrote:
Maybe an answer would be to use TCS not DwC for exchange of purely taxonomic data? How about creating a TCSA format for bulk transfer - or is this not a great thought... (not being that familiar with TCS)
We had all sorts of hideous, intractable problems with TCS, and have abandoned it.
[snip]