Still here too, although I have been silent lately.

I am in reasonably good agreement with Stuart Poss on what needs to be done with relation to data structures and standards - good work Stuart. I will add, briefly, that the issues, in my mind are clearly being debated beyond their level of resolution in that I really don't think that we should be wasting our time trying to figure out sets of descriptors for specific taxa, the inherent data hierarchy and descriptive extensibility are the important things. As much as I would like not to admit it, I have not yet been convinced that DELTA cannot function for us as the basis for taxonomic data structure. We will never regulate descriptor terminology because creative careful observation and the creative and clear semantics involved in communicating those observations completely is the basis of all observational biology. The strength of Systematics as a science is really in our diversity of ways of making observations and communicating them.

Do we need this? I think yes. We need to expand it.

With respect to what needs to be done by TDWG in the big picture. My priority is in developing reliable authority files. Our efforts at making reliable and updateable authority files for many groups and types of data are in their infancy and every database is suffering because of it. Content and structure are both important and we have heard from several clearly gifted thinkers on structure. I think that we need to put some more enegry, as a group, into ways to generate more and better content.

Cheers,

Stinger

-- Gerald "Stinger" Guala, Ph.D. Keeper of the Herbarium Systematist Fairchild Tropical Garden 11935 Old Cutler Rd. Miami, FL 33156

http://www.ftg.fiu.edu/