(LEX) Containment Hierarchies

[Vincent, Leszek]

Dear subscribers to TDWG

I've been 'listening' to the contributions on Lexicons, XML etc. for a while
now and thought I should seek your comments because your contributions have
sparked several developments in my thinking. I'm wrestling with the
development of a hierarchy (containment hierarchies) of systematic
descriptors for corn/maize/ Zea mays for the Missouri Maize Project (see
URLs below). While this is challenging for maize/corn on its own, an added
challenge is my desire to develop containment hierarchies which are
compatible with databases for other grass crops e.g. rice (Oryza). To add to
the challenge I have the ideal of trying to accommodate the 'interests' of
similar databases for various DICOT crops e.g. soybean, cotton. While I do
appreciate that such an all encompassing approach is maybe impossible to
achieve I thought that it would still be good to get some other folks
opinions on this. Having some kind of 'generic' structure which accommodates
monocots & dicots should greatly facilitate the interoperability of these
databases. It's the interoperability scenario which really got me on to
thinking about this issue. Conducting simultaneous searches of dicot &
monocot databases for morphological data down to molecular (e.g. sequence)
data is not too far fetched. But I'm battling to find info. which
addresses/refers to such 'generic' standards.

I'd be grateful to have your thoughts on the above.

Sincerely,
- Leszek Vincent

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P. Leszek D. Vincent Ph.D., FLS
Plant Science Unit, Dept. of Agronomy, 209 Curtis Hall,
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO 65211-7020, USA.
Ph: (573) 884-3716 (Agronomy), (573) Fax:(573) 884-7850;
Ph/Fax (Home): (573) 441-1228; Email: Leszek at missouri.edu
Plant Systematist on the Missouri Maize Project - NSF award 9872655 -
(http://www.cafnr.missouri.edu/mmp/ and  http://www.agron.missouri.edu/)
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