It's How the Data will be Used that Counts

[Kevin Thiele]

I seem to be in a minority of one here again, but I'll continue to argue my
case for a bit longer.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert A. (Bob) Morris" <ram at CS.UMB.EDU>
To: <TDWG-SDD at USOBI.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 2:11 PM
Subject: It's How the Data will be Used that Counts

| I think natural language parsing understanding is harder than natural
| language production from structure. So I think there is less work to
| go from data to description than the other way around.

1. Exactly, it's easier to go from data to +/- natural language, which is
precisely why we need to try hard to facilitate the reverse.

2. If we can effectively embed fully parsable data in a natural-language
paragraph, why not?

3. If a structured data document based on our standard is a subset of a
marked-up description based on the standard, then creating a standard that
can support the latter gives us the best of both worlds. If it can be done,
why not?

Personally I think that creating an XML representation of structured data
would be a doddle. Creating a fully parsable but lossless XML representation
of a natural language description (which hence can also handle the degraded
case of structured data) - now that would really be something to write home
about!

Anyone else out there +/- agree with me, or should I give up now?

Cheers - k