standard format for publications

[Peter Rauch]

Both Fletcher and Stevens (see far below) are touching on an issue that
relates to "descriptive markup" of a work. The "descriptive" notion
refers to what a particular element of the work _is_, e.g., a "species
description", or "date of publication", or "date of revision", or
"illustration", ....

Rather than "color me light blue", or "put me in square brackets along
with the word 'update: '", a descriptive markup would say "I'm an
update". Just what "I'm an update" means syntactically is _not_ part of
the markup language, but is required metadata so that anyone who wishes
to interpret the markup "codes" procedurally will know how to handle
the code.

Now, here's the sweet part. If the taxonomic/systematics community
creates an international standard descriptive markup for its taxonomic
publication content (i.e., for the collection of elements, such as "date
of publ", "species description", and all the other hierarchy of elements
that make up a publication of this kind), then each publisher can
_interpret_ that description according to the particular publisher's
formatting standards. One publisher may treat "date of publ" in blue,
but another may set it off in the left margin in bold, or put it in the
back of the publication with a page reference.

The process of defining a "standardized taxonomic publication" is much
like defining a database schema --you have to model it right, identify
all the meaningful parts (according to the particular discipline's
notion of _meaning_), their relationships one to the other, and build
the description using standard "tools"  for doing that kind of job.
SGML, for example, seems to be the current standard tool for this type
of effort.

Does the international systematics community _really_ want to
standardize its taxonomic publication (whatever that is :>)? It seems
this would be that way to approach it.

Peter

On Sat, 17 Jul 1999, Murray Fletcher wrote:
[was] Re: Useful life of CDROM
> ... I have chosen a slightly
> different colour shade for the date of the update. On each page where there is
> updated information, the new information is in the second colour with a note
> appended such as "[update: 17 July 1999]". There is a need to have a method of
> differentiating precisely which information has been updated. ...
> Enclosing the relevant information and the date of update within
> square brackets may be a better option than using a different colour since
> different browsers and screens may not differentiate the colours well. ...

> Once we have an internationally accepted protocol

On Sat, 17 Jul 1999, P. F. Stevens wrote:
> Subject: standard format for publications
>
> Taking up Richard Zander's point, would it not save a vast amount of time
> if we could agree on a standard format for publications of new names (and
> not only new names; botanical descriptions in general)?  That is,
> everything cited in exactly the same way, in the same sequence, with the
> same punctuation, etc.  If not in the same way, then in ways that are
> maximally compatible with each other. ...

> Different kinds of publications do have diferent needs, but some thought
> will clarify just what changes are necessary in going from a publication
> with one aim to those with another -