Actually, what I'd like to see as a requirement is more modest than this. I simply propose that there should be the possibility of explicitly recording a property name, which need not have any global significance.

The property could be expressed in many ways, but for the sake of an example I suggest that we might possibly have a DELTA character that looked like this:

#2. body <@property degree of convexity>/ 1. strongly flattened/ 2. slightly flattened to moderately convex/ 3. strongly convex/

I absolutely agree that this should be done. Using properties as a classification of characters only, it somewhat comes near to the original intend for properties as published in Diederich: Getting a grip on character definitions that run into 100s of characters. I believe that properties can be best recorded on two levels:

1. A global property classification (I believe this should follow the physical units (1D/2D/3D shape and measurement, time point and duration, temperature, etc.) + human senses, to distinguish taste, smell, etc., + things for pattern/arrangement. I believe centering it on the human observer will make it domain independent.

2. On a second level detailed Properties could be introduced that could, but not necessarily must be domain specific, like WingShape (2D Shape), LeafShape (2D Shape), FungalSporeShape (3D Shape).

These should be extensible in the model.

Clearly there would have been an advantage to the global model. Each state for a property would truly only exist once. If a character set is to be translated, the color states would have to be translated only once, and not separately for each structure the color of which is described. From the responses so far, however, I think we all do not really believe this could work out.

I believe there is an intermediate way, and that is providing templates for properties togehter with states. The more templates that could be offered, the easier the setup of a character definition would be. But the templates would be copied, not linked, so that e.g. too many color states could be copied from the template, and then reduced or changed as needed.

Gregor ---------------------------------------------------------- Gregor Hagedorn G.Hagedorn@bba.de Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA) Koenigin-Luise-Str. 19 Tel: +49-30-8304-2220 14195 Berlin, Germany Fax: +49-30-8304-2203

Often wrong but never in doubt!