Re: [Treebase-devel] Treebase-devel Digest, Vol 10, Issue 14

[Todd V. <tj...@bi...>]

> Lastly, TreeBASE's system of annotating row segments allows multiple annotations for the same character elements. e.g. you can attach, say, 20 lat/long pairs and specimen IDs to the same row segment. This is particularly valuable for morphological data, in which the character scorings are applied to a set of identifiable specimens that were examined. But this does not mean that all characters were scored from the same specimens (if for no other reason that some characters can only be scored from males, others only from females). I would hate to see this valuable chain of provenance lost through the effect of "homogenizing" at the point of serialization.


This is consistent with the model in Phenoscape, as well, in that each phenotype annotation for a given taxon is tied to zero, one or more specimens, and the specimens need not correspond among different phenotypes for the same taxon.  

Todd