This is the part I'm having trouble understanding. What is being "Described" are characters....correct?

well, maybe... depends on how abstract you want to be... but I think I would be inclined towards recording characters and their states to describe the main game: a taxon. You can get there by describing specimens, but you do not have to.

While it is true that researchers have traditionally used character descriptions as a "short-hand" attempt to delineate taxonomic concepts;

Using the perspective above, character description is the tool and not the work... Characters can be described in the absence of a taxon. A taxon can be described by the aggregate of the characters/states (described elsewhere) it does (or does not) possess.

the bottom line is that characters are intrinsically part of actual living, breathing (respirating) physical beings -- not the concepts (represented by names) that are intended to circumscribe a set of individual organisms deemed to belong to a common taxon.

At this point it is very easy to lapse metaphysical... perhaps organs are part of the organism but characters are an artificial human construct... :) [ Over the bottle of fine port one of us is going to win, we can solve this one relatively quickly... ]

When a taxonomist describes a character in the context of a taxon concept,

[ Thinks... Do characters always have to be defined in the context of a taxon? ]

what is really being asserted is that the character as described is shared by the primary type specimen of the name used to represent the concept, as well as the primary type specimens of any/all names deemed to be synonymous, as well as a wide swath of other individual organisms, a tiny fraction of which have been collected and curated in Museums; the vast majority of which live out their lives in their natural environment.

This is probably quite a defensible assertion... the fact that taxonomy exists at all is that we can generalize like this...

In my mind, characters belong to individual organisms -- to associate them directly with taxon concepts (by way of the implied existence of individual organisms that share the character) is merely a short-hand convenience.

Or, the organ and its attributes belongs to an organism... the character and its states belongs to the human who defined it...

Maybe this is getting off track, but my basic point is that if "SDD" is to be qualified in any way, I think it should be qualified in terms of general biology, or biological objects; not necessarily taxonomy.

I agree - taxon description, documentation and identification, especially as implemented in products such as Delta and Lucid, extends what we do far beyond what could be considered taxonomy in the narrow sense.

I agree...but in my optimized view of the data management world, I'd like to see characters linked with taxa via implied (if not real) specimens, even if no specific physical specimen can be cited.

yes - we have another project running here covering a key to Orchid genera. In this case we are not even scoring species level taxa, but we are trying to cover the full range of variation in the genus and we are recording which specimens have been used in this assessment so we can al least go back and rescore if taxonomists change their minds (never! I hear you say). The argument is that if we actually scored the specimens all we would have to do is recompile the key - nice, but unacceptably more work for our budget...

But if this is getting too philosophical for the issue at hand, I'll gladly step back to my previous status of quiet observer, so as not to clutter the list with tangential issues.

but they are the best kind...

SDBO? (Standard for Description of Biological Objects)

or just DBO? nothing like a TLA to make it sound as though you know what you are doing...

DBOML? (Description of Biological Objects Markup Language)

or just BOML...

BODML? (Biological Object Description Markup Language)

see previous...

None very sexy, though...

seen worse...

jim

~ Jim Croft ~ jrc@anbg.gov.au ~ 02-62465500 ~ www.anbg.gov.au/jrc/ ~