[tei-council] Another issue with @pattern

[Gabriel Bodard]

Lou Burnard a écrit :
> Why is it nonsense to say @degree=0.1? It seems more nonsensical to say 
> nothing at all -- how do I know that <precision> means "low" precision 
> rather than "high" precision if you don't tell me somehow?

@degree=0.1 may not be nonsensical per se, but in the context of my 
projects, where all I want to do is call certainty (or precision) into 
doubt, it would be deeply unhelpful. On precision in particular, a 
numerical value is not only meaningless but misleading if it doesn't 
have some statistical significance. (What would a certainty of 0.1 mean? 
What about 0.123964234?)

Values of (high, medium, low) would be ideal. We're only ever going to 
use "low", though, so although as you say certainty without degree 
doesn't actually say anything, we would like to assume that <certainty> 
always in fact means uncertainty.

> I suppose we could add another attribute as an alternative to @degree 
> (cant think of a name though) with values "high" "low" average" as we 
> did for @cert.

Another option might be to make the datatype of @degree enumerated 
rather than constrained to a numerical value. That way projects could 
choose between (low|medium|high) and (0<x<1), or whatever.

G

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Epigrapher & Digital Classicist)

Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
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