[osis-core] ID confusion

[Steve DeRose]

At 08:17 AM -0400 06/26/02, Patrick Durusau wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>Troy called last night (after my bedtime but got the voice mail) to 
>discuss the question of self-identification and IDs. In writing a 
>reply this morning, I have "discovered" an ambiguity that you may 
>all have been aware of but is new to me.
>
>We have ID attributes on all elements (well, verseID on verses but 
>more on that in a moment).
>
>If IDs or verseIDs on verses serve as canonical identifiers 
>(Matt.1.1, Job.5.5) then they have a different semantics from the 
>IDs on pointers, which are just IDs in the traditional sense of 
>SGML/XML IDs, in that they only identify the element for the 
>document instance. They have no meaning outside of the document.
>
>When I was using "Who am I?" I meant it in terms of identification 
>in the traditional SGML/XML sense and not in the sense of a 
>canonical identifier.
>
>For economy reasons I don't have a problem with verseID or other IDs 
>operating as canonical identifiers but I think we will need to 
>document the difference in the semantics. Already part of the way 
>there with verseID, which is not a true SGML/XML ID, although it has 
>some of the characteristics of one.
>
>So, for other texts, Josephus for example, do we need to allow other 
>elements to have something like verseID that will allow them to have 
>a canonical reference without overloading ID or should we simply 
>overload ID and document it?

Hmmmm. Because of the non-Biblical cases we'll deal with later, and 
because we have canonnical identifiers for chapters and whole books 
as well as verses, we might be wise to call it 'canonical-id' (or 
some abbreviation) rather than 'verseId'

-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@speakeasy.net
Backup email: sderose@mac.com, sjd@stg.brown.edu