[tei-council] personography task force

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Christian Wittern wrote:

>Well, the more I think of it the less I like to hurry this through. 
>
My reaction is opposite, curiously. The more I think of it
the more I want it looked at now :-}

>1) For the things that need immediate fix in P5 (e.g. datatypes et.al)
>   Lou promised to write a position paper by the end of the year.
>   This could serve as a base for decisions in a tight time-frame. 
>   personography per se would be out of scope for this.
>  
>
That depends on the scope of what Lou proposes to write
about. Just datatypes is not enough. I don't think we should
persist for another year with anomalies like half the personography
elements being in corpus, for example, and the lack of a death

>2) We encourage all those interested in this to immediately start
>   experimenting by creating extensions that do what people want to do
>   with these persons.  It would also sensible to form a SIG and encourage
>   communication there. 
>
It's not practical to unilaterally form a SIG. Without leadership,
nothing happens; if there is a leader, we can ask them to form a WG

>This could be seen as a testbed for future development in the TEI -
>more community based, less relying on an inner circle of all-round
>experts.  I think it is also a Good Thing (tm) to do standardization
>based on existing implementation and praxis, rather than out-of-the-blue.
>  
>
In some ways, yes. The standardization process should
be based on existing practice, and on a broad input, not
experts dictating future directions. But that's how the TEI
_does_ work: we charter a group, appoint a leader, let current
practitioner parties join, and moderate it with the elected council.

My view is that names/dates/places is an extremely widely practised thing
already, and we can see plenty of examples already, some based on the 
TEI like
those inscriptionists in Sofia, some very loosely related, like DDI, and 
some
new inventions like HEML. We don't need more experimentation, now _is_
the time for the TEI to crystallize practice - I think we are now at the 
stage
you propose for 12 months from now.

Sebastian