[osis-core] open issues

Patrick Durusau osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
Fri, 14 Jun 2002 14:49:30 -0400


It looks like I will be out most of tomorrow but back at full tilt by 
either late tomorrow or Sunday. I need to take Carol to the American 
Library Association meeting and was planning on going to the exhibit 
hall. ;-)

Troy,

So far I see at least four ways of dealing with the problems you have 
noted with bible markup (and I do agree it is a serious problem and we 
do need to make recommendations about best practices):

1. Segmentation (problematic in some cases as you have pointed out)

2. Elements can be written with content or milestones (if my analysis of 
the XML standard is correct and I think you originally suggested this one.)

3. Use the milestone element we presently have with a type attribute

4. Todd's suggestion of creating types of elements with verseID 
(assuming I understood it properly) which looks like an elegant way that 
I had not previously considered.

Agreeing that we have to address the problem, comments or suggestions on 
what would constitute best practices? (I don't think that we can dictate 
for all cases how markup should be done. Well, we can but then the 
standard becomes less useful as situations arise that we cannot now forsee.)

Patrick



Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> Not sure if anyone knows or cares, but most all of my issues brought 
> up in my last messages are still on the table:
>
> archive, if anyone needs the old messages:
>
> http://www.bibletechnologieswg.org/cgi-bin/lwgate/OSIS-CORE%40BIBLETECHNOLOGIESWG.ORG/archives/ 
>
>
> Not wanting to be a wrench in the works, but I still feel our gears 
> are turning fast down a wrong path.
>
> Specifically: segmentation isn't elegant and we can't anticipate all 
> overlapping cases.  Try a few verses from a Prophetic text (e.g. Ez 
> 39:1-) e.g (not from Ez).
>
> 1. Then God said, "Say to my people: 'Thus says the LORD, "Repent! 2. 
> You backsliding markup authors."
>     How often have I desired to give you a good markup. 3. But you 
> were unwilling.
>
>
> Try to add phrase level annotation, critical markup and other tags to 
> that and you have no hope of a human understanding or getting it 
> right, muchless our schema to allow such things.  Anything can be 
> forced to work.  I just don't see why our milestone approach wasn't 
> about 3000x more elegant.
>
> Or even my unanswered suggestion of a having all tags allowed to be 
> used 2 ways with a global 'milestone' attribute (kindof like Todd is 
> suggesting with roles, but not exactly).
>
> global attributes mStart and mEnd
>
> That would allow 2 types of markup.  All tags to either be used as:
>
> XML Container:
> <verse ID="Gen.1.1">In the beginning</verse>
>
> or
>
> XML Milestone / Logical Container
> <verse ID="Gen.1.1" mStart="uniqueID1" />In the beginning<verse 
> mEnd="uniqueID1" />
>
>
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu