Certainly end users need this and many kinds of information. We believe in integrated applications that discover or know where to find the answers to questions like this. See our toy demo http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/xml1/DEVELOP/itis/demo.htm (This requires MSIE, but it is perfectly possible---and probably better---to support this kind of thing at the server.

I subscribe to the belief that simplicity is superior to complexity, especially since much of the infrastructure now available to XML-based applications means that much of the programming to support gathering information from disparate sources is provided in the toolkits.

To pick a field guide at random (or rather, what's at hand): the National Audubon Field Guide to Insects and Spiders has almost no taxonomy above Order (it does mention that the insects are in Class Insecta and Phylum Arthropoda; no mention of Subphylum, Subclass, Superorder, Suborder or other arcana easily found from ITIS). In my experience, field guide books may have a little nod toward taxonomy above Family (or Order if they are meant to be broad) but make no attempt to place the descriptive data in such taxonomy. Electronic descriptive pages vary widely, but those that embed taxonomy in their databases risk errors, excessive and often redundant data, and fragility in the face of taxonomic revisions.

I say that if we are talking about descriptive data, we should just stick to descriptive data.

Bob Morris

Peter Rauch writes:

Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 11:22:45 -0800 From: Peter Rauch peterr@socrates.berkeley.edu To: TDWG-SDD@usobi.org Subject: Re: Morphological Data Representation

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Robert A. (Bob) Morris wrote:

...

My feeling is that taxonomic hierarchy is best got by web applications from services such as ITIS or other web services offering XML. There is a large community of descriptive data consumers, e.g. field naturalists, that find taxonomic hierarchy generally uninteresting. IMO, trying to integrate it with descriptive data actually addresses a small group of applications at a cost of added complexity.

"There is a large community of descriptive data consumers, e.g. field naturalists, that find taxonomic hierarchy generally uninteresting."

Bob, this comment needs a little bit more explanation / discussion.

Without arguing _where_ the field naturalist and other consumers should get their taxonomic hierarchical information, I'd want to argue that such information is (should be!) anything but "uninteresting" to many (most?, all?) consumers, in their work of understanding who is present in their study worlds and why.

Having access to purported (evolutionary) relationships of their study organisms focuses a special, valuable, most "interesting" light on their studies. These users need to find these taxonomic relationships handily, somewhere. In that context, your question --Where?-- is probably a fair one to ask.

Peter