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

[Gabriel Bodard]

I thought the base of an xpointer in @target was deemed to be root, 
*not* any relation to the current node, hence the need for @match in the 
first place?

On 2012-11-28 16:04, Martin Holmes wrote:
> I see the logic there.
>
> If @target is used instead, with an xpath pointer, would the context
> node for that also be considered to be the parent node? If so, wouldn't
> that make the user of pointers in att.scoping/@target different from
> @target defined in e.g. att.pointing?
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> On 12-11-28 07:30 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>>
>> Whereas my intuition is telling me the exact opposite. ;-)
>>
>> If we have:
>>
>> <name type="place">Foo<certainty match="$" locus="value"
>> degree="0.5"/></name>
>>
>> I think the certainty can't and *shouldn't* be able to refer to
>> itself, that is what a nested certainty is for, therefore the
>> default @target is an assumed parent::node(). So in this case $
>> should be @type not ../@type.
>>
>> As Gabby pointed out the flaw in this reasoning of mine is where
>> we want to be uncertain or imprecise about milestone elements
>> which don't have certainty in them (lb for example).  That is why
>> I'm with him in thinking they should have this content (and I
>> think should have <desc> as well given recent discussion on TEI-L).
>>
>> -James
>>
>> On 28/11/12 13:49, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>> This is a tough one. My instinct is that we should go with what seems to
>>> be intuitive, and what's most intuitive to me is that if you specify
>>> nothing, the default is the current context. In other words, the default
>>> value of @match should be ".", and that if you want to point to a parent
>>> element, you have to use "..". That means the examples should be
>>> rewritten to:
>>>
>>> <certainty match="../@who" locus="value" degree="0.5"/>
>>>
>>> etc. And in realistic usage, the @match attribute would be required, to
>>> prevent the <certainty> attribute from expressing uncertainty about itself.
>>>
>>> This would also make @match in line with @target; if @target contained a
>>> TEI Pointer of some kind, that would be evaluated relative to the
>>> current context <certainty>, wouldn't it?
>>>
>>> My head hurts when I think about this, though. <certainty> can contain
>>> <certainty>, meaning that you could have a child <certainty> expressing
>>> doubt about the value of the parent <certainty>'s @match attribute,
>>> while the parent <certainty> could express doubt about the child
>>> <certainty>'s @target. Gawd.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> On 12-11-26 04:41 AM, Gabriel Bodard wrote:
>>>> 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
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