eml PARAGRAPH

[Scott Chapal]

eml-dev,

Has there been any discussion regarding Tim's questions?  I thought he
pointed out an area that deserves clarification before EML 2 is
released.

I too, am thinking there ought to be additional structure to represent
prose.

Tim Bergsma <tbergsma at kbs.msu.edu> writes:

> The problem, as I have mentioned previously, is that prose metadata
> (text) is often highly structured.  <paragraph> gives us no way of
> representing the structure of text, which is itself information.  In
> many instances, of course, <paragraph> is repeatable, which allows us
> some leeway to represent sequential structure.  But there is still no
> way to represent hierarchical structure.  This has significant
> consequences.  For example, a project-level abstract may include a short
> outline of purposes or hypotheses.  A research protocol may include
> finely-grained outlines of contingencies and responses.

> Three alternative solutions have emerged from previous discussion.
> 1.  Decompose structured text into a series of <paragraph>.
> 2.  Inject structured text, with its native markup, as a CDATA block in
> <paragraph>.
> 3.  Make <paragraph> nestable.

...

> I hope that the leadership of the eml development community will offer
> me some guidance on this issue.  I really don't think number 1 is a
> viable option, but could make peace with either 2 or 3.  

I don't particularly like any of those options.

How about deferring to some [SGML/XML] standard to represent prose?

Possibly DocBook; use the (W3C)Schema when it is complete?

Or even the simplified DocBook?
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/docbook/specs/wd-docbook-simple-1.0-CR2.html

Other??

Necessarily, existant documentation would have to be deconstructed or
converted to a markup language format.  Or if visual formatting is
paramount then it could point to a (quasi) neutral file format like
.pdf, but that wouldn't accomplish textual indexing, querying and
structure that EML aims to support.

This comment of Tim's really struck me:

> However, converting hierarchically-structured text to
> serially-structured text will require innovations by the data
> manager that raise him/her to the status of author, a status not
> necessarily sanctioned by those who contributed the original
> material.

I think this concern is largely unwarranted.  Were it viable,
Information Scientists, 'New' librarians and editors wouldn't be able
perform their functions either.  Fidelity to an original work should
be mandatory, but the translation process should be made transparent
and trivial.  If an editing review is needed, then create one.
Perhaps even a 'stamp of approval' or something.  We're talking about
metadata -- *documentation*, after all.  If it's not structured it's
really not very useful.

-- 
Scott E. Chapal_________________________________________________
Database & Network Manager             scott.chapal at jonesctr.org
J.W. Jones Ecological Research Center          229.734.4706 x227
Rt. 2. Box. 2324. Newton, GA 31770-9651        229.734.6650 :FAX