In order to make the Chinese language comprehensible to Western people

earlier Wade一Giles

and more recently

pinyin

have been used to phonectically transcribe Chinese personaland geographic names into Roman alphabets.Phonetically synonymous characters are common inthe Chinese language

and one pinyin syllable on average accounts for 16 different commonly usedcharacters plus 20 additional characters of less common usage

This phonectic synonymy resultsin loss of information when chinese personal and geographic names are transcribed into syllablesbecause these names alone have no context to help correctly interpret the original writing.There-fore

a monolingual database that convert and store Chinese data in Roman alphabets will presentambiguous information to both Western and Chinese colleagues.A bilingual(and possibly multi-lingual)database is preferable because it can archive the original information and simultaneouslypresents a translation of the original data in English

making the data comprehensible to a largeraudjence. An English一Chinese bilingual information system should possess the following functions :1) the database can store two formats of data

i.e. Roman(English ) alphabets and Chinesecharacters :2 ) users may retrieve data in monolingual format(either English or Chinese ) orbilingual format(the same piece of data being displayed in both English and Chinese);and 3) thesvstem can automatically convert the key data from one format to the Other.Therefore

a bilin-gual information system will not require double data entry time in comparison to a monolingualsystem.We have built English -Chinese Bilingual Botanical Information System (BBIS95).Thesystem is compiled with the dBase langllage and UCDOS is taken as the Chinese platform。Oursystem provides all the three functions mentioned above

In addition

the system contains eithteenbilingual dictionaries with more than 250 000 records of taxonomic

geographic

personal

insti-tutional and referential data concerning Chinese and American plants.Data of multiple annota-tions from a single specimen sheet and multiple duplicates of a single collection deposited in differ-ent herbaria are properly recorded. The system also include interface with Geographic Informa-Department of Biology

Zhongshan University

Guangzhou 510275tion System(GIS)

Image Processing and Multimedia。Some bilingual collection data from theherbarium of Sun Yatsen University(SYS ) have been made available on the Southeastern Re-gional Floristic Information System(SERFIS)at the University of Alabama

which is accessiblethrough the Internet computer network(Email to zxu@serfis.by.ua

edu for detail ).In the fu-ture

more Chinese data are expected on-line in similar ways。