At Thursday 28-8-2003, you wrote:

<snip....> 2. However, several aspects of complex descriptive data sets need an operational access to a taxonomic hierarchy. -> default values for new items -> observations assumed to be true for an entire group but not actually observed should be noted as "higher taxa" descriptions and the information should be treated as implied in lower taxa. The situation is identical for implying information from species to subspecies as it is from Family to species. -> Note that in contrast to DELTA, SDD has no special "subspecies mechanism"

Just some thoughts:

I think a transparent mechanism is needed in which you can indicate in the item description which rank a taxon (item) is and you can include as many taxon ranks as you like (the subspecies mechanism is included then). Taxa can link to higher (and maybe lower) taxa, so the program that is going to produce Natural Language Descriptions can include descriptive characters from several ranks (as indicated by the user). Identification programs can start at a chosen rank and continue to the next rank taxa when finished. In XML this would be easy to define.

In this way you could key out specimen for a whole family or flora when included, from family to subforma level if you like.

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