[tei-council] Fwd: Re: TEI Object Working Group

[James Cummings]

Dear Council,

I entirely neglected to forward this to Council and mention it 
during the TeleConference. Mea Culpa.  This is Torsten's WG 
Proposal (attached) for a TEI Object working group. It does not 
include any costings for a face-to-face, but I would suspect that 
it would probably cost less than 50% of a council face-to-face. 
(Since we could have less people attending it, institutional 
contributions, piggy-back on important conferences, or be in some 
central location.)

Please read the attached proposal and comment back to Council 
list (but CC'ing in Torsten and Oyvind) during the next couple weeks.

Many thanks,

-James

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: TEI Object Working Group
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 12:18:14 +0100
From: Torsten Schassan <schassan at hab.de>
To: <James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk>
CC: <stefanie.gehrke at gmx.de>, <oyvind.eide at uni-passau.de>, 
<sebastian.rahtz at it.ox.ac.uk>, <lou.burnard at retired.ox.ac.uk>

Hi James, hi all,

here are some ideas on how to structure the work on the object 
matter.
It doesn't go very much into detail but summarises the 
discussions held
in various meetings and proposes a schedule. No words about the costs
here but financial help to meet f2f might be needed unless the
interested people will meet at certain occasions anyway.

I hope this will be helpful.

Best, Torsten


-- 
Torsten Schassan
Digitale Editionen
Abteilung Handschriften und Sondersammlungen
Herzog August Bibliothek, Postfach 1364, D-38299 Wolfenbuettel
Tel.: +49-5331-808-130 (Fax -165), schassan {at} hab.de

Handschriftendatenbank: http://diglib.hab.de/?db=mss



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A working group (WG) on the <object> matter will have to consider whether

	* it will restrain itself to the description of objects that carry texts (in a broad sense) or allow for the description of objects of any kind;
	* it wants to incorporate the manuscript description elements in the content model of an <object> element (or the like, to be created). Such a hierarchy would follow the examples of the <person>, <org>, and <place> elements (ch. 13) which serve as a space to collect information about a person, organisation, or place and to which is referred by <persName>, <orgName>, and <placeName> elements.
	* the manuscript description elements could be extended to cover the description of objects of all kinds or whether the existing elements and the existing hierarchy of elements represent cataloguing traditions that make it difficult to cover other objects than (western medieval) manuscripts.
	* the fact that a description of an object could be either metadata or data has any influence on the structure of the markup of the descrription or whether the same elements could be used in either places. (i.e. relationship between TEI documents and objects)


The WG has to take the following steps:

	1. get in touch with non-manuscript communities in order to find out about missing elements and attributes, needed or misleading structures within the description or the possibilities to use the manuscript description structures at all for their purposes.
	2. find out about the possibilities to just reword the chapter on msdescription and by this cover objects of other kinds
	3. decide upon the integration of the object description in the chapter on entities (person, org, place) or to leave it separate.
	4. prepare an ODD which represents the forseen changes


Materials that have to be taken into consideration

	* http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/326/ to establish <listObject> and <object> for (real world) objects mentioned in texts
	* http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/187/ discussion on <objectType>



Schedule

2014 Jan - 2014 Jul/Oct      Review of ch. 10 (msdescription) and exchange with non-mss communities, decision whether to integrate it in ch. 13
2014 Oct - 2015 Oct          establish a text and prepare ODD


The WG should meet face-to-face at least twice in order to review the existing wording in the first step and finalise a proposal for the TEI Council in the second step.
Possible occasions might be any major DH meeting, e.g. 26-28 March 2014 in Passau, 7-12 July 2014 in Lausanne, 20-25 October 2014 TEI MM

The WG might have a look at the semantical representation of the description of objects e.g. through CIDOC-CRM.
The WG might consider to propose a way to allow for negative expressions such as "There are no illustrations present".