On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Erik Westlin wrote:

Plant descriptive data is much to complex to be captured in XML which is more geared towards presentation than representation.

I'll second that. I use LaTeX, and previously used a precursor to SGML, to typeset all my printed documents. These *typesetting* languages are great for defining the appearance of the content of documents, but they are utterly inadequate for representing the content (ie., data) itself.

For an example of how to present (think about) the relationships within taxonomic datasets, see Appendix A of the manual for BIOTA. IIRC, the PANDORA website at www.rbge.org.uk may aveso has some diagrams relating to this problem.

Una Smith una.smith@yale.edu

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Yale University New Haven, CT 06520-8106