Free comments anywhere, where it is not clear to which data item a comment belongs, will not help. Also, in free text the same concept will often be expressed with different words. This is a common problem known by anybody who tried to capture free conventional descriptions in a database.

... and is probably intractable. One person can often see data in another comments, while another may see others data as hardly worthy of comment. In many descriptive works the pearls of information are subtle and implicit rather than explicit and in your face (but we will not open the biological description as an art versus a science debate).

Discussions about what is and is not data will go on forever and the critera will change fron genus to genus, gamily to family, order to order, and biologist to biologist.

What is needed is a common standard format to store all descriptive data and information in an understandable and unambiguous way for exchange between applications so that nothing gets lost or made unavailable in transactions between applications and up and down the taxonomic hierachy. To ignore data and information is probably excusable, but to actually lose it is sinful and unpardonable.

It is a shame that verbosity is the price we have to pay for this flexibility, but the tecnology can handle it. I did not think we were considering the 'direct processing' of these tagged XML (or whatever) files; they were to be just the lingua franca of applictions using descritpive data. A contemporary example would be the DELTA format: after Intkey, the DELTA Editor, MEKA or whatever have grabbbed the data they neither know nor care what a DELTA file looks like. What I think we are after is a format like this that all applications know about and can use without any extrenal hacking and preprocessing.

There is a major differece between an effective archival and exchange format and an efficient arrangement of data for processing and analysis; I doubt if it will be posible to have both in the same package. My understanding was that this list was going to focus on the former, while application developers and closet hackers were going to whatever they needed or wanted with the latter.

A recurring nightmare is the thought of pouring data backwards and forwards between applicatons, losing a little at each export/import like the fraying ends of an aging chromosome at each cell division, until eventually there is nothing left...

jim

__________________________________________________________________________ Jim Croft ~ jrc@anbg.gov.au ~ http://www.anbg.gov.au/people/croft.jim.html ph 02-6246-5500 ~ fx 02-6246-5248 ~ GPO Box 1600 Canberra ACT 2601