I found last year that I was torn between the accessions working group and the sdd working group, so I wonder if anyone is interested in about a half-day pre-meeting discussion of XML schemas/DTD for descriptive data on the afternoon of November 8, to continue in the regular meeting. Based on our own experience in our Electronic Field Guide project, my current belif is that descriptive data will generally need much smaller schemas than accession data, largely because

(a). the latter is likely to have tags for a lot of stuff descriptive pages need anyway and (b). mostly what is needed is some stuff to be able to provide data typing information to characters. XSchema is quite good at this.

Because of (a) I will lobby in the accessions group for a clean separation of markup that's about biological and spatio/temporal concepts from markup that's about records. It may be that events, e.g. collection events is another area of overlap. Indeed, one focus of a premeeting might be to take the output of the accessions work and see what overlap there is in desired markup.

Bob Morris