[Tcs-lc] Taxonomic order anyone?

[Gregor Hagedorn]

> I am not suggesting we actually do these things with TCS but it should 
> be able to do the list bit of each. Suppose we want to supply a list of 
> birds of the British isles for use in a survey and we want to put them 
> in the same order as in the main field guide. Are you saying TCS should 
> not be able to do it? I would imagine that other schemas will supply 
> descriptive and other detail but surely TCS should be doing the "These 
> taxa in this order and this is what they are called" part. 

Well yes. I just think it is  a very limited application, just expressing the 
sequence of occurrence. I would imagine to make that fieldguide-sequence more 
meaningful, you would very soon also like to have the pagination and headings 
present - which is why I thought it easily is too much for TCS and more 
appropriate for Flora/Fauna markup or online-monograph standards on a higher 
level (reusing the types of the other standards).

However, if you want to express sequence I believe it is  sufficient to agree 
that the order of elements in the instance document must be preserved and is 
semantic. I would not like to load all data exchange with this agreement, 
however, since it is a severe burden on many potential uses of name or concept 
data. So if data go from original provider through several processes in a 
chain, I believe it would be unwise to require all of them to preserve order.

(Unfortunately, w3c schema really lacks any mechanism to express this. RDF has 
seq, set, and bag types for this, but to me - as biologist - it seems more 
appropriate as part of the schema).

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203