From heidorn@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu Mon Oct 6 22:54:45 2003 Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:53:08 -0500 From: Bryan Heidorn To: Kenneth R. Robertson Cc: karen Medina , Lesley Deem Subject: Structure for Descriptive Data Hello Ken, Could you meet with a few of the people on the OpenKey project to discuss the structure of the data that is being stored. Can you meet next Monday or Tuesday morning? Oct 6 or 7? 9:00-11:00. Yes. I fear it will take 2 hours. Can you think of any other biologists who might be interested in participating? I do not want to talk about vocabulary but rather what type of information needs to be tracked. The easiest is of course LISTS of character values like colors. We also need to address issues such as how to address numbers or different types such as cardinal numbers (e.g. number of stipules), ranges (e.g. Min/Max leaf length), maxima (e.g. tree height, viral growth rate), uncertainly, multiple languages, taxanomic group as character (e.g. It is a fern not a tree), mixing natural language description with character states... All of these issues are already address in the TDWG SDD discussed here http://160.45.63.11/Projects/TDWG-SDD/Minutes/TDWG-SDD-Minutes.html It is difficult to read the XML documents in those meeting minutes so there is a graphical representation of the same. It is long but more readable. http://160.45.63.11/Projects/TDWG-SDD/Minutes/2002Brazil_schema/Brazil2002-SDD_xsd.html Karen Medina is preparing a similar document for our much simpler OpenKey data organization. Karen will distribute a url for this before the meeting. We'll also discuss the original OpenKey goal of developing an application based on a subset of SDD. Over the next two weeks we will have two people here from schools with strong programs in metadata management and programming. Jane Greenberg from Univ of North Carolina who you know and Abby Goodrum from the SUNY-Syracuse. We'll be able to fold in discussions of how to get funding and the skills needed to implement SDD. Regards, Bryan -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- P. Bryan Heidorn Graduate School of Library and Information Science pheidorn@uiuc.edu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign MC-493 (V)217/ 244-7792 Rm. 221, 501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820-6212 (F)217/ 244-3302 http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~heidorn Calendar: http://calendar.yahoo.com/pbheidorn Visit the Biobrowser Web site at http://www.biobrowser.org