Yes. Actually I mean two things. The simple is that there is some data that just is text and not processable but should still be in a treatment. For example, Natural History comments or social factors like, "Native Americans used this tree to construct canoes because they could." or some other more useful comment.

I also mean that not all character states can be grounded in reality. I agree with Peter that they _should_ but there is a lot of legacy data out there and we don;t have the collation rules that were used by the authors to come up with the generalities. So we need to support the word "ovate" as a leaf shape descriptor <leaf_shape>ovate</leaf_shape> or we will not be able to support legacy data. Even if we do not really know what they meant by "ovate." I think this can be covered in your standard document and in XML since we can define a property for the tag to say how we got it. <leaf_shape type=text> or for "grounded data" <leaf_shape type=collationRule|where-to-find-rule> or if the leaf shape was for a specimen instance and described with an ellipsoid Fourier descriptor <leaf_shape type=EFD>e1:0001;e2:0212;e3:0981</leaf_shape>

An application can define the semantics based on the type property (meta-data) conversely we could make different leaf_shape tags for the different types but I think that is a bad idea.

cheers, bryan At 08:28 AM 7/20/00 +1000, you wrote:

At 06:58 PM 18/7/00 -0500, Bryan Heidorn wrote:

...

I do not see how we can avoid mixing data in a treatment. I'll need to go

back

...

and reread Bob's comments on that. Generally I don't see how we can have a standard that requires all fields to be reduced to finite states. Some

things

...

will just need to be unprocessed (by the computer) text.

You mean like the "Text" character type of DELTA?, or unparsed textual notes attached to characters/states/taxa/data items?

Cheers - k

-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- P. Bryan Heidorn Graduate School of Library and Information Science pheidorn@uiuc.edu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (V)217/ 244-7792 501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6212 (F)217/ 244-3302 http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~heidorn