I believe there is an intermediate way, and that is providing templates for properties togehter with states. The more templates that could be offered, the easier the setup of a character definition would be. But the templates would be copied, not linked, so that e.g. too many color states could be copied from the template, and then reduced or changed as needed.
As an n-dimensional continuum, colour has always been dificult to quantify - the number and size of available templates is mind-blowing. And so much is subjective - true believers know the colour turquoise is a green, heretics insist it is a blue; and where are the boundaries around and within the violet/indigo/purple/mauve/lilac impression?
petals white/pink/red/orange/yellow/green/blue/purple is simple enough, but there are problems where you might want to draw a distinction betwen scarlet and crimson, or the intensity of the hue (almost white, but did it get there by losing yellow or losing green or by gaining a little bit of red?).
In the interests of precision and flexibility it would seem sensible to adopt a property/scheme/value model like the metadata bods tend to do. That way you could be as precise as you like with Royal Hort. Soc., Munsell, Panatone, etc. colour charts, or R/B/G and C/M/Y ratios and people could work out exactly what you thought you were dealing with.
The only trouble is the data becomes completely unintelligible an meaningless to the average human - a perfect no-win situation.
But there are probably instances where you would want to do such a thing, and our model should accommodate it.
As Kevin has pointed out several times, the notion of universal lexicons or vocabularies is incredibly seductive, but often involve a lot of work and running around that rarely results in the promised joy and bliss. Sort of like a global currency and free trade - a good idea, but not likely to happen. Our best bet is to resist the tempation to build the complete description of all things right away, but to model and plan exactly what it is we are tyring to do; the tools and raw ingredients will follow.
jim
__________________________________________________________________________ Jim Croft ~ jrc@anbg.gov.au ~ http://www.anbg.gov.au/people/croft.jim.html ph 02-6246-5500 ~ fx 02-6246-5248 ~ GPO Box 1600 Canberra ACT 2601