Comment on Gregor's Special States document.

Gregor writes: "All these special states apply to entire characters. SDD currently provides no mechanism to express partial knowledge within a character (e. g. to score one state as not applicable, but another as present). Theoretically it is possible that a character is only partly entered, but this is not likely in a well designed terminology (it does happen where character clusters are combined into pseudo-characters, but such a design is considered problematic)."

Not so. One important difference between Lucid and DELTA is that DELTA can only encode uncertainty for a whole character, Lucid only for a character state. Often in Lucid we do encode uncertainty for an entire character (for example, fruit colour is uncertain for a given taxon because fruits are unknown) - we do this by (slightly messily) encoding uncertainty for all the states of the character:

Fruit colour (coding for taxon x) red - UNCERTAIN yellow - UNCERTAIN pink - UNCERTAIN white - UNCERTAIN ....etc

In other circumstances, we encode certainty data for some states of a character, uncertain for others:

Distribution by States within Australia (coding for taxon x) Victoria - ABSENT New South Wales - PRESENT Queensland - PRESENT Northern Territory -UNCERTAIN Western Australia - PRESENT South Australia -ABSENT Tasmania -ABSENT

This is real coding for a taxon that has been collected in rainforests in northern New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. It has not been recorded in the Northern Territory, although suitable rainforests occur there and it may well be found there. I'm confident that it does not occur in the other states.

Cheers - k