Dear Kerry,

I can not see how what you propose could work. The name of a character is not necessarily unique across different taxa, and often not even within a taxon. Further the character concept and its names (technical, laymen, English, German, etc.) are a 1:n relation. The name can not stand for the character, only a code can. I do not care whether this code is characters or numbers, but I believe it is a mistake to think if something is <haircolor></haircolor> to take the code at face value and assume you know what are hairs and what is color. Hairs are quite different things in plants, animals, or fungi, and color needs information whether it is a code from a color comparison chart, or an undefined term like "red".

I think I am sticking less with a DELTA storage optimization model, but with a relational information model, which is what I have been using for all my projects. The relational model allows language independence. How can you preserve that, without having unique codes that lead to the definition of a character?

That does not mean, that a free text description in some language, say Chinese, may be present, in addition to the data. That is why I am thinking of attributes, not element data.

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

Often wrong but never in doubt!