I seem to be in a minority of one here again, but I'll continue to argue my case for a bit longer.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert A. (Bob) Morris" ram@CS.UMB.EDU To: TDWG-SDD@USOBI.ORG Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 2:11 PM Subject: It's How the Data will be Used that Counts

| I think natural language parsing understanding is harder than natural | language production from structure. So I think there is less work to | go from data to description than the other way around.

1. Exactly, it's easier to go from data to +/- natural language, which is precisely why we need to try hard to facilitate the reverse.

2. If we can effectively embed fully parsable data in a natural-language paragraph, why not?

3. If a structured data document based on our standard is a subset of a marked-up description based on the standard, then creating a standard that can support the latter gives us the best of both worlds. If it can be done, why not?

Personally I think that creating an XML representation of structured data would be a doddle. Creating a fully parsable but lossless XML representation of a natural language description (which hence can also handle the degraded case of structured data) - now that would really be something to write home about!

Anyone else out there +/- agree with me, or should I give up now?

Cheers - k