On 6/13/2011 2:41 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 4:20 AM, Brett Zamir<bret...@yahoo.com> wrote:
For example, to take a water-damaged text (e.g., for the TEI element
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-damage.html ) which
in TEI could be expressed as:
e> <damage agent="water" xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0/";>Some water
damaged words</damage>
might be represented currently in Microdata as:
<span itemprop="damage" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0/";>
<meta itemprop="agent" content="water"/>
Some water damaged words
</span>
This still wouldn't quite work. Embedded Microdata has no
relationship with the surrounding DOM - the only meaning carried is
whatever is actually being denoted as Microdata. So, in the above
example, you're indicating that there is some water damage, but not
what is damaged.
If you wanted to address this properly, you'd need to format it like this:
<span itemprop=damage itemscope itemtype="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0/";>
<meta itemprop=agent content=water>
<span itemprop=subject>Some water damaged words</span>
</span>
This way, when you extract the Microdata, you get an item that looks like:
{ "items": [
{ "properties": {
"damage": [
{ "type": "...",
"properties": {
"agent": ["water"],
"subject": ["Some water damaged words"]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
Thanks, that's helpful. Still would be nice to have item-* though...
Note, though, that Microdata or RDFa may not be quite appropriate for
this kind of thing. You're not marking up data triples for later
extraction as independent data - you're doing in-band annotations of
the document itself. As such, a different mechanism may be more
appropriate, such as your original design of using a custom markup
language in XML, or using custom attributes in HTML. There's no
particular reason for these sorts of things to be readable by
arbitrary robots; it's sufficient to design for ones that know exactly
what they're reading and looking for.
With the likes of Google offering Microdata-aware searches, I think it
makes a whole lot of sense to allow rich documents such as TEI ones to
enter as regular document citizens of the web, whereby the limited
resources of such specialized semantic communities can leverage the
general purpose and better-supported services such as Google's Microdata
tool, while also having their documents editable within the likes of
WYSIWYG HTML text editors, and stored on sites such as discussion forums
or wikis where only HTML may be allowed and supported.
I think such a focus would also enable the TEI community to benefit from
reusing search-engine-recognized schemas where available, as well as
helping the web community build new schemas for the unique needs of
encoding academic texts.
Brett
