Steve Shattuck in March responded with a long and detailed criticism of my Special States proposal/Brazil minutes mix, for which I am very grateful. I currently try to revise the information.

One important point Steve raised was that the term "Special States" is very confusing because, although they are documenting knowledge management metadata in the object description, they are not terminological states in the character definition.

I was never happy with "special states", but neither in Brazil nor in Paris we found a better name. The current options are:

<li>Management states (not "internal" data management)</li> <li>Data scoring</li> <li>Status states</li> <li>Status flag</li> <li>Data entry status</li> <li>Control states</li> <li>Special states</li> <li>Completeness states</li> <li>Incompleteness states</li> <li>Completion states</li> <li>Pseudo character values (used e.&nbsp;g. by L.&nbsp;Dodds in XDELTA proposal)</li> <li>Replacement values</li> <li>Meta states ("meta ..." was considered too unspecific, being only a relative statement)</li> <li>Missing data indicators</li> <li>Missing data flags</li> <li>Null states</li> <li>Null values</li> <li>Knowledge constants/values/flags</li>

"Data entry status flags" seems appropriate, but awfully long.

"Knowledge management state" seems to be a bit too general, because it is only part of Kn.man.

"Missing data flags" can easily be misunderstood as "missing data- flags" rather than "missing-data flags"

Has anybody a bright idea? ---------------------------------------------------------- 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!