Kevin: >Or can we have a set of linked standards - one for describing in the boring

old characters/states/taxa way, and others for the more space-shuttle

ways

that can be linked in as they develop.

and Eric >it is rather difficult to

combine datasets based on differing character lists, even when those

character lists are fairly similar. There is no mechanism for

"mapping"

character states from one dataset onto those of another.

We are back to an issue that was raised earlier, so at the risk of boring people by repetition, the way to record data is not (if at all possible) as states, but as measurements. Measurements of the same character from different studies <underline>may</underline> then be combinable, and states extracted from the measurements. But if one is combining states, then one is likely to be in trouble. The "approved shapes" that a committee of the Systematics Association came up with some years back are fine for communication in descriptions and conversations, but the best way to record shape data, whether for phylogenetic analysis or deciding if one heap of specimens really is distinct from another, is as measurements.

(I agree that a list of "approved" characters is probably not attainable at present.)

This raises another issue that Eric mentioned:

Another aspect

might be the inclusion of meta-data (e.g., who recorded this

observation,

and on what material?) While this sort of information can be placed

into

DELTA "text" characters and comments (as could virtually anything

representable as a string of bytes, with a bit of effort), the use of

text

characters does not provide for well-structured access to the

information.

This issue of metadata is very important: if a DNA sequence is linked to a voucher, then all measurements/observations should be linked to specimens. In an "ideal" database, there would be links to specimens, if only through a literature citation; not being able to make easy links in the literature can make it difficult or impossible to use, and not having such links in a database greatly reduces its value. If I go wrong in including a specimen in a particular taxon, I want to be able to pull out all information associated with this specimen, whether it is simply length of leaf blade or how the anther wall develops, when I put it in its cotrrect place.

Peter S.