[osis-core] When an osisID is not an osisID?

[Patrick Durusau]

Greetings,

A brief diversion on one of the topics that Todd brought to my attention 
some time ago.

If you look at the CEV translation of Matthew, you will note that about 
mid-way in the first paragraph, it has a reference to 2-6a and a little 
later, a paragraph begins with 6b-11.

My suggestion to Todd was that this is not actually a referencing system 
in the CEV, but is in fact the use of a foreign reference system to 
allow someone using this text to map back to an inconsistent system from 
the one in the CEV.

 From my reading of the CEV, this system appears to follow no particular 
practice in terms of relating this references to actual structures in 
the text and operate as the print equivalent of milestones rather than 
as osisIDs on containers.

Since I think we are likely to find any number of such translations 
(that don't have any container correspondence to traditional references) 
I would strongly suggest that we document that such references should be 
encoded as milestones using osisRef (coming in a little while) as 
opposed to osisID. Since osisRef will allow the specification of ranges 
and this is actually a reference to a reference system, that appears to 
make the most sense to me. (I am also not unmindful that it avoids all 
sorts of nasty crossing problems.)

Proposal:

For translations/texts  that do not follow a canonical reference system 
but that do refer to such systems to document particular places in the 
text, the structure of the text should be encoded but references to the 
external system, whether on an element or by milestone appearing in 
running text, should be using the osisRef attribute of type osisRef.

Patrick

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