Preliminary comments on the Draft TC37/SC4 N033

[Lou Burnard]

As promised a day or two ago, I now append my VERY PRELIMINARY comments
on the draft ISO/TEI standard for feature structures.

Comments very welcome. We have a couple of months to form a TEI consensus about this but I'd like to know as soon as possible if there's anyone out there with an opinion about this stuff!

1. The general introductory material on feature structures is useful
   and informative, especially for the reader who doesn't know about
   this particular way of representing informartion. However, it seems
   very strange that the introduction makes no reference at all to the
   way in which feature structures may be represented using XML, since
   that is the topic of the standard! The comparisons between the
   matrix and tree notations are very helpful, but why not extend them
   to include comparison with the XML notation? The draft could point
   out that the things (very confusingly) called tags in the matrix
   representation scheme are equivalent to the ID/IDREF mechanism in
   XML. It might also explain why the root of an FS in the DAG
   representation is represented as a type attribute, and so on.

2. Talking of DAGs, I'm not sure that this mechanism can or should
   support cyclic graphs. There is a casual reference to these in
   footnote 3 which I think  needs expansion, or removal.

3.In section 4,5 there is discussion only of simple lists. Since the
  TEI scheme goes to some length to distinguish lists, bags, and sets
  (inter alia), it might be worth mentioning that not all lists are
  simple here!

4. The introduction also needs a para introducing the idea of feature
   (etc.) libraries

5. There are a couple of comments saying that more linguistic examples
   are needed. There are quite a few of these in the TEI vault, which
   I would be willing to dig out and bring up to date with the current
   P4 syntax if that would be of use.

6. A large section explaining not only <rate> but also <str> has been
   excised from section 5.3.  I understand why <rate> might not seem
   immediately relevant to linguistic applications (tho surely there
   might be some applications in phonology?) but I think it should be
   kept in the standard, and that means it needs to be explained as
   clearly as the other primitives. 

7. I don't quite understand what is meant by the reference to
   <alt>. It is a generic mechanism in P4, which could be documented
   in the ISO standard with reference to alternation in general, as a
   generalisation of the specific <vAlt> <fAlt> etc. elements.
   The reason for having these  more specific tags, by the way,
   is that they permit more constrained content models. 

8. There are at least 2 references to the feature system declaration
   as section 6, but this is the bibliography (which, by the way,
   doesnt seem to reference TEI P4!)

9. The DTD as presented here is incomplete: several of its elements
   are unreachable. I think a tag library style presentation might
   be more helpful

10. There are at least two references to the linking mechanisms
    defined in P4. As these mechanisms are likely to be revised quite
    substantially at P5, I think it might be advisable to make some
    explicit statement about which of the various possible mechanisms
    is required by this standard. Some reference to xLink should also
    be included.