Kevin your document makes interesting reading. Further to my earlier email on purpose I see how morphological descriptive data (such as DELTA handles - which may well be the primary aim) would fit within your described format. IF your aim were for this format also to serve for: 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? best wishes Bob Allkin, Centro Nordestino de Informações sobre Plantas SIDT/PNE, Dep. Botânica, CCB, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil CEP 50.670-420 Home Page : http://www.cnip.org.br