Re: [tei-council] Notes on standoff

Am 06.05.2015 um 14:46 schrieb Hugh Cayless :

I’m finally getting a chance to look seriously at the standoff ODD and so I wanted to pull together my own notes and get some discussion going here that we can feed back to the proposers.

1) Why such an elaborate header? (see https://github.com/laurentromary/stdfSpec/blob/master/Specification/standoff... https://github.com/laurentromary/stdfSpec/blob/master/Specification/standoff...) I can understand wanting to have some description of the content of <stdf> (or <ldb> as Syd proposed—I happen to like that better), but this seems maybe a bit overboard. Why can’t the document’s own revisionDesc serve to document revisions to the standoff section, for example? I think we took biblFull as a model and removed some parts and added others. Generally, stdf can come in two flavors: standalone, i.e. stdf is the only resourceLike and there is no text. Then the teiHeader contains the meta data about the stdf element. (That’s why the soHeader is optional.) When stdf js attached to some resourceLike and/or some text, then we need some elaborate meta data container for the stdf element since it might come from some very different processing chain or being reused or … I don’t think that’s one of the week spots of the proposal ;)

2) Since standoff elements can nest, why do we need the <annotations> element? (see https://github.com/laurentromary/stdfSpec/blob/master/Specification/standoff... https://github.com/laurentromary/stdfSpec/blob/master/Specification/standoff...). Wouldn’t it be simpler to allow the standoff element just to contain a heading and its content, optionally including more standoff elements? Grouping and nesting is something that could be achieved in other ways, I agree. But I guess Laurent will have an argument to make!

3) I can sort of guess what <mapStruct> might be for, but it isn’t very clear (see https://github.com/laurentromary/stdfSpec/blob/master/Specification/standoff... https://github.com/laurentromary/stdfSpec/blob/master/Specification/standoff...). Do we not already have sufficient mechanisms for attaching standoff markup to its targets? We were thinking of providing a mechanism to e.g. encode poems standoff. So we wanted to create the structure (lg/l etc) within annotation while only pointing at the text. I’m not aware of any existing mechanism?

Best Peter