On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 10:54:36 -0500, Julian H humphries@MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU wrote:

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

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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?

No, I was thinking of seperating the metadata about the package "This is a data set of Magnolias from FNA, it was assembled by, organized by, dates, etc.) from the data describing the character states of the individual taxa. So a good question is what do you do with the character definitions! It seems the character state values without the character definitions would not be of much use for any system to interpret the meaning of the states. Two options, de-normalize the character definitions and put them in each concept schema, or two have a separate server, and an external reference in the data schema that, has the character definitions. Not sure how that choice would play out.

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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.

How about an ASCII graphic? I'm on thin ice, but if the metadata for the package is this:

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

and the individual taxon character state sets are this:

taxon1 taxon2 taxon3 char-val-1 char-val-1 etc. char-val-2 etc. char-val-3

if the taxon data sets (and maybe also their character definitions)we in sperate XML documents, then we could use them as fodder for other concept systems.

The overhead for the traditional diagnostic identification software

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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?

yes, if you had multiple xml docs for the same 'diagnostic package' they would be managed as distinct files.

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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.

People serving SDD data sets thorugh the web, would presumably be aware of data set integrity issues and make sure their SDD packages were complete.

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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