Steve Shattuck wrote:

Leigh's comments are good and worth a detailed look. His model/representation/syntax (or whatever you want to call it) of the same data I used (see http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccslrd/delta/lep.xml) is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind. Does his representation make more sense than the one I proposed? What are the strengths/weaknesses of our approaches. Does one allow us to get to where we want to be? Again, I don't think the

Shattuck's and Dodd's proposals indeed seem basically identical (with XDELTA deserving priority, since it has been presented first; it also seems a little bit more detailed than Shattuck's proposal).

What I miss is an integration of the morphological data representation with the representation of the taxonomic hierarchy (that has never been properly dealt with by DELTA) in a single XML format for the purpose of storing and exchanging taxonomic datasets. Gilmour's "Taxonomic Markup Language" (http://www.albany.edu/~gilmr/pubxml/ ) could provide a good start in this direction.

I would appreciate very much any comments in this connection.

Regards,

-- + - - - - - - - - - - - - Mauro J. Cavalcanti - - - - - - - - - - - - + | Setor de Paleovertebrados, Departamento de Geologia e Paleontologia | | Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro | | Quinta da Boa Vista, 20940-040, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, BRASIL | | E-mail: maurobio@acd.ufrj.br | | Home Page: http://www.maurobio.cjb.net | + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - + "Life is complex. It consists of real and imaginary parts."