Draft Spec mark 2

[Una Smith]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Erik Westlin wrote:

>Plant descriptive data is much to complex to be captured in XML which is
>more geared towards presentation than representation.

I'll second that.  I use LaTeX, and previously used a precursor to SGML,
to typeset all my printed documents.  These *typesetting* languages are
great for defining the appearance of the content of documents, but they
are utterly inadequate for representing the content (ie., data) itself.

For an example of how to present (think about) the relationships within
taxonomic datasets, see Appendix A of the manual for BIOTA.  IIRC, the
PANDORA website at www.rbge.org.uk may aveso has some diagrams relating
to this problem.

        Una Smith               una.smith at yale.edu

        Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
        Yale University
        New Haven, CT  06520-8106