[tei-council] DCR alignment inside ODD

[Piotr Bański]

Hi Stuart,

On 30/04/12 12:18, stuart yeates wrote:
[...]
> I've been looking at http://www.isocat.org/datcat/DC-1345 in more detail.
> 
> I've written up a quick XSLT to transform the webpage into a DTD (see 
> both transform and output below). Feedback welcome. Is it worth 
> including this in the TEI distribution?

I believe that part of the intended charm of ISOcat is that it is both
static and dynamic: it provides a potential variety of systems (e.g. for
POS and more refined grammatical information) which are frozen for
external reference. The reason that there are a variety of systems is
that no common agreement in this area can be reached, but the
user/scholarly communities may at least communicate their ontological
concepts, and various networks of relationships can be postulated among
them, externally to ISOcat.

Adopting a single view as a snapshot of one section of ISOcat may
actually be contrary to the entire principle, and would place the TEI in
one concrete position on the map of competing reference networks, with
the immediate question of "why this one and not any of the others?". We
would be moving from a standards view that tries to enable
interoperability by aligning the concepts to the view of "one golden
standard to rule them all", which has been shown to be untenable.

Furthermore, ISOcat is not the only framework of reference possible. I
think what we want is to provide a way to uniformly relate to *some*
external repository of concepts, rather than taking a *single* snapshot
from *one* repository.

Best,

  P.