Jean-Marc Varel, Don Kirkup and others have repeatedly touched the problem of existing textual descriptions in their discussions contributed to this list.

On the other hand, I myself belong to the group of DELTA/NEXUS minded people, who are concerned mostly with knowledge management of descriptive data that are created new.

These issues should be seen quite separately, and that we need both

1. A markup language for text documents. This includes: - existing descriptions, captured by OCR or other means, where the markup would be manually (or automated/data mining?) - computer generated natural language descriptions that are published as electronic documents. A new CSIRO package could have a ToNat command that automatically adds the necessary, hidden markup code. 2. A data language for new observations, including repeated measurements or repeated observations of categorical data, e.g. shape of multiple leaves in a single specimen. Further, many structures for knowledge managements (data revision, annotation, quality control and assessment) need to be implemented here.

The issues overlap, and it would be beneficial to use as much common syntax as possible, but fundamentally I believe them to be quite different.

See also the separate post "Item description data in XML (XML)" for discussion of how to achieve this in XML and with XML examples.

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

Often wrong but never in doubt!