[tei-council] Disambiguation of <ident> and <idno> (and also <gi>)

[Laurent Romary]

Hi Martin,
This is a very accurate proposal. I am OK with everything, except that I would consider the brown case as neither an ident nor an idno but a real ref here.
Otherwise, unless we hear some shouts, I would encourage you to implement.
Cheers,
Laurent

Le 23 nov. 2011 à 01:16, Martin Holmes a écrit :

> Hi all,
> 
> Following the Council meeting in Paris I was tasked with 
> <http://purl.org/TEI/FR/3188679>:
> 
> "...Assigned to MH to clarify the guidelines on the difference between 
> <idno> and <ident>..."
> 
> This is how they're currently defined:
> 
> "<ident> (identifier) contains an identifier or name for an object of 
> some kind in a formal language."
> 
> "<idno> (identifier) supplies any form of identifier used to identify 
> some object, such as a bibliographic item, a person, a title, an 
> organization, etc. in a standardized way."
> 
> 
> My initial impulse is to supplement these descriptions with something 
> along these lines:
> 
> -------
> <ident> should be used for tokens such as variable names, class names, 
> type names, function names etc. in formal programming languages. (It 
> should not be used for element and attribute names in XML, for which the 
> special elements <gi> and <att> are provided.)
> 
> <idno> should be used for labels which uniquely identify an object or 
> concept in a formal cataloguing system such as a database or an RDF 
> store, or in a distributed system such as the World Wide Web.
> --------------
> 
> In the Guidelines themselves, we use <ident> (correctly in my view) for 
> the names of classes such as att.internetMedia, and the names of modules 
> such as "core" and "header". But we also use it for values such as the 
> following:
> 
> http://www.example.com/browncorpus
> p299
> 
> I think these are actually wrong and should be corrected -- see below.
> 
> 
> <idno>, on the other hand, is used for lots of URLs (clearly 
> legitimate), as well as DOIs and semi-descriptive pointers which are 
> presumably resolvably unique -- here's a sample:
> 
> 119
> L434
> 0-19-254705-4
> 1256
> 0143-3385
> doi:10.1000/123
> http://authority.nzetc.org/463/
> Thomason Tract E.537(17)
> C695
> 1-896016-00-6
> 0 345 6789
> 1140-3853
> NISTIR 4681
> 978 0 573 01972 2
> MS. Add. A. 61
> 28843
> MS Poet. Rawl. D. 169.
> RES P- YC- 1275
> Y. 1341
> Taisho Tripitaka Vol. T08, No. 230
> 
> 
> So I have two questions for the group:
> 
> 1. Do you think that my explanatory text is accurate and helpful enough 
> to do the job of disambiguating these two elements?
> 
> 2. Does our usage of the tags in the Guidelines comply with what we 
> believe to be the use-cases of the elements? (Ignoring for the moment 
> the case of the questionable uses of <ident> below.)
> 
> 
> 
> * I think <ident> is questionable here, and based on the definitions 
> above, I think <idno> should be used instead:
> 
> <p>[...]
>     <egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples" 
> xml:lang="und"><catRef target="#b.a4 #b.d2" 
> scheme="http://www.example.com/browncorpus"/><catRef 
> target="http://www.example.com/SUC/#A45"/></egXML>
> Here the same text has been classified as of categories <val>b.a4</val> and
> <val>b.d2</val> within the Brown classification scheme (presumed to be
> available from <ident 
> type="file">http://www.example.com/browncorpus</ident>), and as of category
> <q>A45</q> within the SUC classification scheme documented at the URL 
> given.</p>
> 
> If I'm right, then many other uses of <ident type="file"> might also be 
> <idno>, assuming that a filesystem is a "formal cataloguing system", 
> which it surely is.
> 
> 
> ** I think <ident> is wrong here; it should be <val>:
> 
> <p>[...]
> Here the targets of the cross-references are simply page numbers; it
> is assumed that corresponding elements with identifiers
> <ident>p299</ident>, <ident>p143</ident>, etc. have been provided in
> the body of the text, for example as page breaks
> <egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples" xml:lang="und">
> <pb xml:id="p143"/>
> ...
> <pb xml:id="p144"/>
> ...
> <pb xml:id="p263"/>
> ...
> <pb xml:id="p299"/>
> ...
> <pb xml:id="p442"/>
> ...
> </egXML></p>
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Martin
> -- 
> Martin Holmes
> University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
> (mholmes at uvic.ca)
> -- 
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> 
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Laurent Romary
INRIA & HUB-IDSL
laurent.romary at inria.fr