At 08:10 AM 7/20/00 +1000, Kevin Thiele wrote:
At 11:56 PM 18/7/00 -0300, Bob Allkin wrote:

[...]

1) description of distribution (a hierarchical descriptor - with attributes
attached to each substate such as native/introduced/etc)

2) description of use [e.g. taxon- plantpart(eg leaf) - forwhom (eg
children) - forwhat (eg sorethroat) - how (eg infusion)]

3) description of ecology - requiring links between two "descriptors" (eg.
plant A is a tree at altitude X BUT plant A is a bush at altitude Y)

   then Im less clear how these would be accomodated.  Is there elsewhere a
set of descriptor/state structures that I could see?

[...]
Can you suggest a way to accommodate your suggestions?

The examples Bob gives are very complicated (higher order logic? [he suggests quickly getting in over his head in formalisms!]).  At least part of the complication derives from the fact the "subject" is a species (or taxon) rather than a specimen, and is necessarily a summary of primary data. 

I think we talked earlier about the simplest sorts of statements taking the form of a logical triple:

[THING]    has    [ATTRIBUTE CLASS]   of    [ATTRIBUTE VALUE]
[fish-123] -->    [dorsal spines]     -->   [11]

A simple (minded?) solution to Bob's example #3 might be to accommodate the complexity by narrowing the scope of the THING:

[plant A at altitude X] --> [growth form]  --> [tree]
[plant A at altitude Y] --> [growth form]  --> [bush]

This might be a bad approach...  whatever.  The point I want to make is that the statements above are simple, whereas statements like

PART-A of TAXON-B is used by CULTURE-C for FUNCTION-D in SITUATION-E

are so close to natural language, that the software/standards problem is WAY beyond our capabilities.  I think we should designate this level of complexity as "out of scope". 

I would rather see us focus on the scope implied by the union of: 1) basic description (Delta), 2) identification (IntKey, Lucid, etc.), and 3) phylogenetics (PAUP and McClade).  I think that's a pretty significant challenge.


  -- finally --

Would it be possible to get "data models" (or at least simplified "core" models) of the relevant applications posted or pointed to?  I think we're operating with a severe handicap until we have them.

-Stan