About DELIA

DELTA’s “Holy Grail” of managing and moving data across multiple projects is no longer a pipe dream! DELTA (or Descriptive Language for Taxonomy) is a methodology and file format for managing the creation of taxonomic descriptions on a computer.

DELIA, the DELTA Integrator, extends the utility of DELTA format files by providing functionality that the DELTA System software can't. It provides a way to manage multiple datasets coded in DELTA and is designed to integrate with and complement the existing DELTA System suite of programs. It is designed for those DELTA users who are interested in managing their data in an integrated environment.

It currently has the ability to:

1. Integrate and maintain multiple DELTA projects (ie copy characters and items across projects)
2. Integrate with DELTA softwares (CONFOR & INTKEY)
3. Automatically generate derived character scores (eg. weed category, which is based on distribution. As the distribution of a weed changes, its category changes)
4. Automatically generate TIMAGE and CIMAGE files
5. Generate Exception reports to validate the data

Do you:

• Spend a lot of time maintaining DELTA data-sets?
• Want to be able to move characters and items across projects?
• Want to be able to automatically derive character scores based on the scores of other related characters?

If any of these are the case, DELIA will be your indispensable companion!

DELIA can read and write DELTA formatted files and will communicate directly with the INTKEY suite of programs. It will also automatically generate the taxon image (TIMAGE) file for input into INTKEY.

If you are part of a workgroup, DELIA will enable you to amalgamate and consolidate any number of DELTA projects, making their management much easier.

The Western Australian Herbarium, after seven years research, is proud to release DELIA, the DELTA Integrator. The beta-test version of version 1.0 is now available and we hope to release the production version soon. For more details contact Mike Choo.

Features

DELIA is a sophisticated tool and is developed in modules. We will release and support additional features, as they become available.