In respnse to Steve Kevin wrote:

The terminology is +/- trivial at this stage, but I'll explain that I chose something different from character/state simply to break with tradition for a while. Traditionally, a character has states and that's it - a 2-level tree. In the example above one character (leaf) has as child another character (margin). This seems odd to many people thinking traditionally about characters/states. Let's agree that we'll use them interchangeably for now.

And I think we have all become bilingual in this regard...

But sooner rather than later I would like us to nail this terminology down, to free up the synonyms forus elsewhere in our model as much as anything else...

Also, I am not yet convinced that unbounded nesting of characters is necessary the best way to go in terms of representing a hioerarch of character data... but maybe it is...

At the end of the day, a state of a particular character (or a value of a feature) is used in a key decision or choice and the hierachy is not all that important other than the order of presentation orlogical grouping of characters. In the description the hierarch similar provides the logical order of the characters and their states/values.

Perhaps we could use features for the hierachy and characters for the ultimate branch. For example features could contain features or characters (but not both) and characters would have states which would have values (present, absent, doubtful, rarely, in error, or whatever, or a measurement/count).

Reaching agreement of this level of data description, and the terminology we are going to use would seem to be essential for clear and unambiguous communication within the group.

But if we can't agree, I can wait... because we aregoing to have to doit sooner or later...

jim