At 11:56 PM 18/7/00 -0300, Bob Allkin wrote:

Kevin your document makes interesting reading. Further to my earlier email on purpose I see how morphological descriptive data (such as DELTA handles - which may well be the primary aim) would fit within your described format.

IF your aim were for this format also to serve for:

1. description of distribution (a hierarchical descriptor - with attributes

attached to each substate such as native/introduced/etc)

2. description of use [e.g. taxon- plantpart(eg leaf) - forwhom (eg

children) - forwhat (eg sorethroat) - how (eg infusion)]

3. description of ecology - requiring links between two "descriptors" (eg.

plant A is a tree at altitude X BUT plant A is a bush at altitude Y)

then Im less clear how these would be accomodated. Is there elsewhere a set of descriptor/state structures that I could see?

You're right that the structure at the moment does not accommodate some data types well. It uses the standard structure of a character list where each character has a list of states and taxa are scored for those states. Distribution data particularly could use a more sophisticated approach - sometimes we can fit distribution into this (e.g. Character = "Which continent?" States = "Australia", "Antarctica" etc.) But can we do better?

Can you suggest a way to accommodate your suggestions?