Re. XML gateways

[Jim Croft]

>No offence to Bob, but when I read his posting, I thought I'd indavertently
>opened something from Brad McFall!

Taxacom is noted for a number of things, among them: unintelligible
rubbish   (such as the recent postings of B.McFall), intelligible rubbish
(such as the postings of <taxacomMember>insert your
favourite</taxacomMember>) and unintelligible wisdom (from the likes of Bob
Morris)

Bob and Jun Wan's recent offering is a portrait of the future of biological
information management...  ok, maybe it is more of a table napkin sketch
than a portrait, but the potential is pretty damn impressive...

It is one of the more refreshing things I have seen on taxacom for a while
and revived my taxonomic spirit...

>All the discussion about XML, etc. means little to this rapidly ageing
>curator/taxonomist.

Neither did the internet and email to most of the population when it first
came on the scene.  XML is the next wave - it promises to unlock the
mountains of data of all sorts that we so labouriously collect...

>I haven't got the expertise (or access to it) to be able
>to manipulate databases, and if I took the time to learn, I wouldn't have
>any time to do curation, taxonomy or survey work.

With any luck you will not have to...   Even cretinous packages like MS
Word and Excel spew out a sort of XML when squeezed hard enough...

We curators and taxonomists need not sweat too much on the
technology...  just think carefully about the structure and content of the
information we are dealing with, tell this to the propeller heads and say
'make it so'...

>Producing simple text files of world checklists or classifications may not
>be as sexy as on-line interrogational databases, but they'd be a hell of a
>lot more useful to me. I'm not knocking the "let's look up a name"
>species-finder sites (they can be real life-savers sometimes) but for most
>of what I want, straight classified lists of families and species would be
>fine.

Tell Bob...  it that is what you want, that is what he will use XML to give
you...  using the same data set... he will even arrange for it to be put on
paper...

>I don't think I'm alone in this - there are many small museums,
>college departments or independant researchers who can't afford to buy
>published checklists (which are inherently out-of-date) and who haven't got
>state-of-the-art computers, fast internet access or software-support staff.
>Finding the useful sites can be a real nightmare, though some like ETI's
>http://www.eti.uva.nl/Links/frame_link.html are helpful. Even then I still
>find myself spending hours typing in classifications from published sources
>because they're simply not available on-line.

This is the really tragic part...  what if there was a standard frame work
or definition we could pop all these classifications (or whatever) into and
deliver via the web to whoever needed it?  Bob's fiddling with XML promises
to be able to do all that...  and more...

What people like Bob and Jun Wan need is for people like us to get together
and agree that this is what we do, this is how we treat the data, and this
is what we want to do with the data that we hoard...

Seems simple enough but is proving next to impossible, given the human
condition to reinvent rather than collaborate...

>If anyone is
>interested in having a copy of what I've produced, then mail me and await
>attachments. The files comprise straight text listings of most European
>(some world) families of plants and animals in the format Phylum & Class &
>Order & Family, with source references. (Not so much like Bob's candy -
>rather more like lumpy porridge!)

Bob's description of what he has as candy is probably a bit
generous...  more like a heap of sugar...  still tastes good, still rots
teeth, but needs a bit more work and packaging before it becomes a consumer
item...

jim