Dear subscribers to TDWG

I've been 'listening' to the contributions on Lexicons, XML etc. for a while now and thought I should seek your comments because your contributions have sparked several developments in my thinking. I'm wrestling with the development of a hierarchy (containment hierarchies) of systematic descriptors for corn/maize/ Zea mays for the Missouri Maize Project (see URLs below). While this is challenging for maize/corn on its own, an added challenge is my desire to develop containment hierarchies which are compatible with databases for other grass crops e.g. rice (Oryza). To add to the challenge I have the ideal of trying to accommodate the 'interests' of similar databases for various DICOT crops e.g. soybean, cotton. While I do appreciate that such an all encompassing approach is maybe impossible to achieve I thought that it would still be good to get some other folks opinions on this. Having some kind of 'generic' structure which accommodates monocots & dicots should greatly facilitate the interoperability of these databases. It's the interoperability scenario which really got me on to thinking about this issue. Conducting simultaneous searches of dicot & monocot databases for morphological data down to molecular (e.g. sequence) data is not too far fetched. But I'm battling to find info. which addresses/refers to such 'generic' standards.

I'd be grateful to have your thoughts on the above.

Sincerely, - Leszek Vincent

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox P. Leszek D. Vincent Ph.D., FLS Plant Science Unit, Dept. of Agronomy, 209 Curtis Hall, University of Missouri-Columbia, MO 65211-7020, USA. Ph: (573) 884-3716 (Agronomy), (573) Fax:(573) 884-7850; Ph/Fax (Home): (573) 441-1228; Email: Leszek@missouri.edu Plant Systematist on the Missouri Maize Project - NSF award 9872655 - (http://www.cafnr.missouri.edu/mmp/ and http://www.agron.missouri.edu/) xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox