[tei-council] Examples for certainty|precision @match

[Gabriel Bodard]

After fixing the problem with certLike having been inadvertently removed 
from the content model of <space>, I was about to add an example or two 
to the usage of <certainty> and/or <precision>, when I noticed an 
apparent inconsistency (or at least potential confusion) in the 
guidelines description of the @match attribute.

At 
<http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-att.scoping.html>, 
@match is defined:
"supplies an arbitrary XPath expression identifying a set of nodes, 
selected within the context identified by the @target attribute if this 
is supplied, or within the context of the element bearing this attribute 
if it is not."

I take this to mean that in the absence of @target, if I want to point 
to a <gap> element from a <certainty> inside it, I should write:

<gap><certainty match=".."/></gap>

(The example under match indeed gives match="parent::tei:gap/@reason", 
which I take to be consistent with my usage.)

A note further down adds:
"If neither attribute (sc. @target, @match) is present, the expression 
of certainty applies to the context of the certainty element itself, 
i.e. its parent element." (For starters, this should say "certainty, 
precision etc.".)

But I take this to mean that an element <precision/> should be 
understood to have a default value of match=".." (rather than match="." 
which might be more intuitive). This is not inconsistent, but perhaps 
slightly confusing. (At the very least we should offer more examples here.)

In the examples at 
<http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CE.html#index-body.1_div.21_div.1_div.2_div.4> 
(yuk!) however, we uniformly see values such as:

<certainty match="@who" locus="value" degree="0.5"/>
<certainty match="@resp" locus="value" degree="0.2"/>
etc.

Since the certainty element in these cases has neither who nor resp, 
this usage seems to imply that the starting point for the XPath in 
@match is the parent of the [certainty|precision] element that bears the 
@match attribute.

On the one hand, it is probably simplest to say that the examples in CE 
are wrong and we should just fix them by prefixing all of these @ with 
../ (which is how I've been using this attribute).

On the other, however, if the starting point of the XPath were the 
parent element rather than the [certainty|precision] element itself, 
then it becomes less defensible to have some transcriptional elements 
that cannot take certainty or precision as children, as I argued at the 
last F2F. So I don't mind which way we go on this one. ;-)

Any thoughts?

G

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
Researcher in Digital Epigraphy

Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

T: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
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E: gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
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