Ainsi parlait Gregor Hagedorn :

If character are defined with an id (numeric or character) in one file, and the item descriptions use these ids through idref or through xml-schema keyref means:

How can a validating parser validate the schema, including keyrefs, without having to include the entire character definition in each of 1000s of taxon description xml files? Can the ids for idref/keyref be declared to be in a separate file?

I could not find a standard xml-include command. I know there is one defined for dtds, but that is all I could find.

Can the xml experts help?

I'll try to summarize the discussion we had during the field trip, maybe it will be clearer for everyone.

You want to have a descriptors file (the model), validated against a descriptors schema. And a taxons file, validated againt a taxons schema. But you also want to ensure coherency between the model and the taxons, such as referencing the correct descriptors, or the correct descriptors states.

One way would be to use XSLT to performs this additional coherency enforcement. You can include the descriptors file in the taxons file before validating it, you can search for aberrant xpath statement result, etc...

The other way i would suggest would be to drop the static taxons schema, and dynamically generate it from the descriptors file using XSLT. Then you'll have one-step validation. But no more generic descriptive model.

BTW, the second approch is the one used by IKBS project (http://www.univ-reunion.fr/ikbs), even if they don't use XML. -- Guillaume Rousse rousse@ccr.jussieu.fr GPG key http://lis.snv.jussieu.fr/~rousse/gpgkey.html