eml PARAGRAPH

[Matt Jones]

Scott and Tim,

I agree its an issue.  It had fallen off of my radar screen.  I've 
entered it as a Bug and targeted it at the next release.  See my 
description of the problem at:

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558

Seems to me that Docbook and XHTML are reasonable candidates.  Fairly 
easy to do with XML Schema.  Fairly difficult to do with just XML 1.0 
DTDs, unless we make paragraph have a content model of 'ANY', which is 
not the desired effect.  Hrrrmm.

Matt

Scott Chapal wrote:
> 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.
> 



-- 
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Matt Jones                                    jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439   Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)

Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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