standard sloppy values (was) The end of DELTA?

[Susan B. Farmer]

>This came up in several different forms already, but any hierarchy should be
>able to be terminated at any level without generating a syntax error.
>Semantics
>need to be defined based on the depth of the hierarchy in any particular
>instance. This will help to accommodate the large body of semi-structured text
>descriptions that already exist and were discussed earlier. For example, the
>"Leaf" node might be defined to contain a list of optional properties (or
>sub-nodes) such as size, shape... but the standard should allow for free text
>description as well, perhaps by allowing for a <NaturalLangage> as one of the
>options, sort of an "other" category but with definable semantics.

One of the things that I did when I was coding up my original DELTA dataset
(since I was wortking from published floras, etc) was to code a text
character at the end of the characters for a given organ (e.g., leaf)
that included the text of the protolog, or whatever textual description
that I was working from .  This wasn't necessarily for searching
or information retrieval; but rather it was to allow me to *later*
come back and verify the data without having to go did the original
source off the shelf.  Lazy woman's option.

Susan Farmer
sfarmer at goldsword.com
Botany Department, University of Tennessee
http://www.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Trillium