[This is bcc'd to several mailing lists. Apologies for duplicates you may receive.]
The Taxonomic Working Group subgroup on the Structure of Descriptive Data (TDWG-SDD) of the International Union of Biological Sciences maintains an email discussion list on which there has been recent discussion of proposals of Kevin Thiele to formulate XML representations of a minimal controlled vocabulary for taxonomic descriptive data. The material at http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/ThieleDraft/thiele_0_3.html illustrates our efforts to draft an XML Schema from Thiele's draft proposal version 0.3 ("TDD0.3") and illustrate its utility with simple applications manipulating a taxonomic treatment.
Some of the pieces are best viewed with MSIE5, but any browser should do.
We'll be talking about this work at the TDWG meeting in Frankfurt November 10-12.
Bob Morris Jun Wan