The material at http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/ThieleDraft/thiele_0_3.html illustrates our efforts to draft an XML Schema from Thiele's draft proposal version 0.3 ("TDD0.3") and illustrate its utility with simple applications manipulating a taxonomic treatment.

No-one seems to be commenting on this, at least on the list... is it all too scary? With Halloween just around the corner, do these guys deserve to be tricked or treated?

Unless people are commenting directly to Kevin/Bob/Jun, I would imagine they would be feeling pretty disappointed so far...

I have been through this a number of times, still trying to come to grips with the various options that have been used from the draft specs of a few weeks ago... and why...

This is a great attempt at implementation and surely demonstrates that we are on the right track... doesn't it?

Yes, the format does seem a bit verbose, but from what I gather Bob and Jun are saying, let the software, applications and databases worry about that...

Personally I prefer something like:

<taxonomy> <rank="species" value="alfari"/> <rank="genus" value="Azteca"/> <author value="Emery"/> <year value="1893"/> </taxonomy>

to something like:

<DESCRIPTION name="Taxonomic Information"> <FEATURE name="Species Name"> <FEATURE_VALUE>alfari</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> <FEATURE name="Genus Name"> <FEATURE_VALUE>Azteca</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> <FEATURE name="Namer"> <FEATURE_VALUE>Emery</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> <FEATURE name="Name Year"> <FEATURE_VALUE>1893</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> </DESCRIPTION>

but if we never have to read it in this format, I do not suppose it really matters...

Anyway, it looks as though we are settling on an architecture allows both discursive descriptions accommodated by 'narrative' elements, and for the compulsive obsessives, a nested set of 'features' that can have 'feature_values', 'qualifers' and associated 'narrative'... Right?

And that the competing architecture of a list of 'feature_values' that can be present, absent, unknown, doubtful, present by misinterpretation, absent by misinterpretation, imaginary, etc. has been given the flick?

Or having coded the data in this manner, is this distinction in data representation employed by different interactive identification products, not really relevant or meaningful?

Sorry about the rambling - just trying to come to grips with what has been done here... I am pretty sure it is good stuff once I work out what it all means...

One vague background concern I have is with things like:

<FEATURE name="Page Author"> <FEATURE name="name"> <FEATURE_VALUE>John T. Longino</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> <FEATURE name="efg address"> <FEATURE_VALUE>The Evergreen State College, Olympia WA 98505 USA</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> <FEATURE name="email"> <FEATURE_VALUE>longinoj@elwha.evergreen.edu</FEATURE_VALUE> </FEATURE> </FEATURE>

which seems on the surface to correspond to ye olde library cataloguing metadata stuff. Is there a wheel here we do not need to reinvent?

Related to this there are a number of projects around to place using XML to mark up and display descriptive data and taxonomic treatments and they seem to inventing rafts of 'feature' names for what appear to be the same things in terms of blocks onf information. At the higher and metadata level, is it too early to talk about rationalizing these? Being very wary here, not wanting to open the Pandora's character-list box of worms again...

jim