[tei-council] attribute/datatype data updated

[Christian Wittern]

Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman at Brown.edu> writes:

> James, thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback!
>
>
>> Why is tei.data.duration set up defaultly not to allow plurals?
>> Things take 3 weeks (or longer :-) ) not 3 week. I think in
>> addition to wk/yr/week/year/month there should be
>> wks/yrs/weeks/years/months. I would abbreviate month as
>> mnth/mnths, if I did at all.

How about d (day), w (week), m (month), y (year); these tokens then do
not take plural forms.

> I thought about this for only a few seconds, and thought that the
> unit being used is a thing, in the singular, of which there may be
> multiples, which cause us to use the plural. More importantly, the
> capability to use the plural only makes sense for those which are
> derived from abbreviations of English words: year, month, and week.
> Everything else is a symbol from Comit&eacute; International des
> Poids et Mesures, and as such is really already plural, and can't be
> expressed with an "s" appended. (The speed limit is 100 km/h, not
> kms/hr.) 
>
> Should there be plurals for year, month, and week? (I don't think I
> care.) Should we bother with abbreviations of those three? (It's
> easier for the editors if we don't :-)

Have you looked at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions/#durations-dates-times, which
devotes a whole section to Durations, Dates and Times.  Certainly
worthwhile to stay compatible with that. XPath in turn references ISO
8601, but being from the ISO this is not available on the web, so I
can't check what they say. 

On a related note, in Chinese you have a cycle of 60 days which is
used as a reference (sometimes in paralell) to the year/month system.
There should be a place for this as well, ideally.

>
>
>> @calendar = What about Lunar & Solar (as more vague types of
>> astronomical?), Gregorian? I believe the Tibetan calendar is
>> different from the Chinese one. I would personally like 'Regnal'
>> since many of the dates I've used are in an English Regnal
>> calendar. (I.e. 5 Edward III for the 5th year of the reign of
>> Edward III). 'Fiscal' could be another type of calendar, since that
>> fixes each month a a specific number of weeks to facilitate
>> economic comparisons. Maybe 'Liturgical'...but there are different
>> ones depending on faith. There are others at
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars
>
> All good suggestions, I think. Is there a more definitive list
> somewhere that we should use as a basis?

I doubt that you can do with a global list.  

>
>> @ed on <milestone> = point to xml:id on <text> maybe?
>
> Won't work in the general case of having more than one edition
> encoded in the same file. There are a lot of ed= attributes that need
> to refer to a controlled vocabulary. I think we need to create an
> <edList> or some such in the <teiHeader>.

Yes, that is true.  I have always wondered where this dangling @ed
points to.

>> @form on <biblItem> = Should other formats be included? video.MPEG7
>> audio.MP3? Or does this relate only to the physical form? Also,
>> what about 'webpage'?

form does not look like the right thing for these, I would expect
something like mimetype for such things. Might worth be looking at
stuff like METS, since that is where they deal with what is out in the
wild. 

On the whole, it looks like we need to spend a bit more time on this...

All the best,

Christian

-- 
 Christian Wittern 
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN