Dear Colleagues,

you will all be aware that the SDD list fell over several months ago. My interpretation of this is that many of the taxonomists on the list were left behind, perhaps early on, by the energetic discussions over issues of data structuring (XML, schemas, RDF etc). Most of this was certainly way over my head. Things got too top-heavy, and attempts to structure the discussion using message tags didn't seem to provide much focus.

Recent discussions (at a meeting on US-Australian cooperation in bioinformatics in Washington, July 2000, attended by several SDD contributors) has again highlighted the great need for an SDD standard and shown that the lack of a new, inclusive standard is holding back progress on descriptive databasing and software design.

We need to restart the list with better focus. I'd like to suggest that the way forward is to entirely set aside (for the time being) any discussion of data structure and focus entirely on content (the requirements analysis) for a while. We should agree on an outline of the data that we need to capture, then pass this on to the computerheads to provide a best-practice structure for storing and managing this captured data.

The attached document was put up to the list shortly before it fell over. It's attached again here, slightly edited. ANY TAXONOMISTS STILL OUT THERE - please look at this. What data that you need to capture aren't handled here? Will this work? Is this the way to proceed?

I think that the document subsumes the data requirements of the DELTA and Lucid programs, plus a bit more particularly in the areas of data attribution and hierarchical nesting of treatments. The intention is that the elements in this list should provide a way of storing any data needed to describe the morphology or anatomy of any organism or taxon.

Note that this should be read merely as a list of data elements - the structure of the list does not imply a structure for the data file (XML or otherwise) used to store the data.

It may be the case that this document can be jointly modified to produce a final document, or we may need to start from scratch with another. Any ideas?

Cheers - k