Terminology chapter in P5

[Syd Bauman]

lb> When this matter was last raised, over a year ago, the editors
lb> were asked to find out whether anyone was using it in its current
lb> form, and duly canvased the TEI List. From memory, one or two
lb> respondents expressed interest in the area covered by the
lb> chapter, ...

To be precise, 

* 1 person interested in response, as he plans to mention this tagset
  in a talk;

* 1 poster's students use it in a course, but he seems to prefer
  an AFNOR recommendation (which I think is the equivalent of one of
  the ISO specs mentioned below, but I'm not sure);

* 1 project actually using it for an Italian youth language database;

* 1 consultant who has a client happily using the tagset, but the
  client won't permit the consultant to talk to us about it; and

* 1 user thinking about using it, sought (and got -- thanks Laurent!)
  advice on TEI-L.

I think that's it. Did I miss any?

<p>lb> I think the choices are:
lb>  1.  Leave it as it is
lb>  2.  Remove it
lb>  3.  Replace it with a brief paragraph which points to ISO 12200,
lb>      and explains how to embed XML documents from another namespace
lb>      in the TEI
lb>  4.  Replace it with a new chapter which presents in TEI-P5 style a
lb>      generally useful subset of 12200, or a tagset compatible with
lb>      same.

lb> Option 1 is a non-starter, I think.

Right, we can't leave it as is.

<p>lb> ... Option 2, which I also feel decidedly uncomfortable
lb> with (though less so than with option 1)

I agree with Lou; I think option 2 only makes sense if we plan to
stop supporting terminological databases altogether (i.e., for future
releases of the Guidelines, too). Someone (Laurent? Lou?) has said
that TEI should continue to support termbanks, as it's right up our
alley. But see below.

<p>lb> Options 3 and 4 both require effort from someone, and I don't
lb> know who is likely to be able to provide it.

How much effort are we talking about? At least option 3 seems like it
wouldn't be all that hard. Especially if the explanation of how to
embed XML documents from another namespace into TEI was broken off
as a separate (more general) discussion, and this chapter simply
pointed to that discussion and provided an example.

<p>It seems there are already a lot of available formats for this kind
of stuff (OLIF, ISO 12200 aka MARTIF, Geneter, TBX, XTL; some of
which probably conform to TMF aka ISO 16642, some of which are
probably outdated, even if I have all this alphabet soup right),
about which I know almost nothing. I wonder which of the above
options is actually more of a service to the termbase using
community? If option 3, is MARTIF better than TBX or the others?