[tei-council] Proposal for TEI website stable URIs and archiving

[Daniel Paul O'Donnell]

Thanks David and James! This is really interesting. I have a couple of 
questions/points.

The first is that there are really three things going on here, as I 
understand it:

   1. a proposal about persistent URIs for the Guidelines and Archival
      Material in the Vault
   2. a proposal about persistence and multi-format delivery for the
      website as a whole based on 1
   3. a proposal for the reorganisation and presentation of the
      Guidelines from the tei-c.org front page

Is that a fair summary?

Assuming it is, then my first question is how functionally important is 
proposal 2 and 3 to the realisation of proposal 1? If we need to triage 
these proposals or assign them to different groups of people, how 
related are they. I agree very much with your comments in point 
three--I've often been tempted to jump in and just rewrite the P5 index 
page if bothers me so--though I can imagine there may be other aesthetic 
ideas about where the link from tei-c.org/index should go. But it seems 
to me to be a distinct issue from points 1 and 2--and hence something 
that could be assigned to a distinct individual or group.

In the case of 1 and 2, I don't know how distinct the two solutions are. 
Can we redo the Guidelines as extensionless URIs as you propose without 
doing the rest of the site? Is it the same amount of effort to carry 
through the extensionless URIs to the whole site as it is to just the 
Guidelines and the Vault? Would pushing an extensionless system through 
the whole site delay in any way the development of an extensionless 
system for the Guidelines and Vault or delay the migration of the Vault 
to Virginia?

In Lyon, Council expressed an interest in assuming responsibility for 
the Vault, in part as part of this desire to have persistent URIs for 
Guideline versions. Since the Vault and its migration has been a thorn 
for many years now and since the Oxford server hosting it (as I 
understand it) is on its last legs, it seems to me that making sure the 
URI system is implemented for the Vault and Guidelines is of the highest 
priority. While I like the proposal to extent this to the rest of the 
site, I would not want to see issues in or debates about rolling this 
out for copies of our minutes or our membership page slow down rolling 
it out for the Guidelines.

I think my preference would be to see the migration of the Vault and the 
developments you propose for extensionless URIs executed above all else. 
The changes to the index page too, while a separate matter, I think, 
seem reasonablely Council's business as well, and hence easy to 
implement at the same time. Only if rolling out the extensionless URIs 
across the site as a whole can be done without adversely impacting 
rolling the Guidelines work would I see that as being an immediate 
priority--for this group, at least. I think (2) is a very good idea, but 
less important than (1) and (3) unless it is possible to do without much 
thought as a simple extension of applying the scheme to the Guidelines 
and Vault.

All that being said, finally, I do think that we probably are in need of 
one of those periodic reviews of the general website that all websites 
require. We'll (hopefully) be adding a webstore very soon and it would 
be also nice to automate our news--perhaps making better use of the 
Sourceforge feed as James has suggested. For that reason it might be a 
good idea to schedule your suggestion (2) as part of a more general 
re-fluffing of the site as a whole. In that case, I'd say let's see f we 
can implement (1) and (3) before the member's meeting this year and then 
commission some more detailed work on the site as a whole for 2010. 
Would that make sense?

Anyway, thanks very much for really solid work on a problem that I think 
we all thought was going to be easier to solve! I hope this will finally 
allow us to open the vault and translate (in the liturgical sense) its 
contents to a new home. Lazare veni foras!

-dan

vid Sewell wrote:
> All,
>
> James and I have been conferring on a proposal for stable (or "canonic")
> URIs for documentation on the website, including the archiving of
> TEI releases. The proposal is here:
>
> http://lister.ei.virginia.edu/~drs2n/uri-proposal.html
>
> Please take a look at this and offer feedback.
>
> The proposals assume that we can make some changes to directory
> structures and the ways that certain files are named or URLs are
> resolved on www.tei-c.org. Some of these changes would be technically
> more complicated than others. Any proposal that we agree on will still
> need to be considered by the people responsible for administering the
> server, namely Chris Ruotolo and sysadmin Shayne Brandon; if their
> verdict is that some things are difficult or unworkable, we may have to
> revisit the recommendations. (The proposal for extensionless URIs is the
> most likely source of difficulty, I think.)
>
> David
>
>   

-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/