At 10:44 AM 4/15/2004, you wrote:

single discussion, but it struck me that TDWG-SDD has an opportunity to have much broader acceptance and support if your schema was not designed as a single data object--to contain both the metadata about the package (or work or whatever you refer to it as) *and* the descriptive data that describe the individual concepts.

Another novice (pre-novice) here, are you specifically referring to separating out taxonomic concept information (metadata) from the descriptive data?

If the taxa/concepts had their own schemas and were linked to the package metadata with a GUID, maybe a DOI or some other globally unique identifier, then the XML concept data sets could be used for other systems like concept based classification or database management systems.

Could you write this sentence with a few more words? I'm want to be sure I get the concept.

The overhead for the traditional diagnostic identification software

makers would be that the XML parts would need to assembled for the various applications that use the data and there would be the potential risk that SDD data sets would be incomplete, if there were some careless file management.

What parts could get lost? the taxonomic parts?

But presumably you guys are thinking about a registry or distributed federation of these data sets anyway, where they would be archived and served intact from a trusted source.

Um, now I am really lost, amplify please? What does this have to do with incomplete SDD data sets? More on dataset archives in the next email.

I also understand that data sets of diagnostic identification information are far from complete descriptions of concepts in either a taxonomic or phylogenetic sense, but if the SDD concept schema could accommodate additional characters, then the opportunity would be there for other people to use SDD for other kinds of systems. The UI of diagnostic key programs would likely not need to use or display DNA sequences for interactive identification, but no harm done, they could just ignore fields of no use to the program at hand.

Ok, now we are getting to something I know about. See the next email for some comments on this...

Julian

Julian Humphries DigiMorph.Org Geological Sciences University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 512-471-3275