Just a couple of brief comments.

I agree as well with most of Starts thoughtful comments. It is even worth putting into my keep folder on this issue to review whenever I make the mistake of thinking I've covered all of the bases.

The other comment is that I don't think that it is useful to think of this as a standard that data must be stored in by anyone. It is better thought of as a gateway like Z39.50 (and ZBIG). Your data on your computer stays in whatever format is best for your application, it is only when you want to share that data that you provide the "standard" view of the data. It is also not necessary that we specify any particular set of characters or character states. What be need is a mechanism for having one computer (agent 1) ask the other computer (Agent 2), "Hey you, what data do you have?"

Reply from Agent 2, "I have plant morphology data, some specimens with images,... and I can give them to you in Format X. Want 'um?"

Agent 1, "Sure, what characters to you have encoded?"

Agent 2, "I have Angiosperm Macrobiology set 1 Version 1.2 and Microbiology Set 2 Version 13.3."

Agent 1, "I'll have the Angiosperm set, for species X, Y and Z. Thank you."

Agent 2, "<taxonid>....</taxonid><morphology><plantheightmaximun units=m Authority=Caldwell98>5</plantheightmaximum><plantheightminimum units=m Authority=Caldwell98>2</plantheightminimum>....</morphology>.....

There needs to be a little authorization conversation between the computers before this to make sure that Agent 1 had access to all of the data that agent 2 can provide... This sort of thing is done in Z39.50 and other protocols all of the time. SpeciesAnalyst does it for some data.

The format of the data on Agent 2's disk is anything at all, an MySQL database, flat files, whatever. It is just the gateway software that knows the standard.

I assume that for now what we need to focus on is providing a framework so that some Angiosperm expert could create a "sub-standard" definition "Angiosperm Macrobiology set 1 ". Right?

Having said that, I am off for the lake county of Michigan. Back in a week. I hope you all have this figured out by the time I return.

Cheers, Bryan

-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- P. Bryan Heidorn Graduate School of Library and Information Science pheidorn@uiuc.edu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (V)217/ 244-7792 501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6212 (F)217/ 244-3302 http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~heidorn