Re: Bibliographic Databases

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi,

Andreas Wagner wrote:
> Just out of curiosity: What are your reasons for preferring this over TEI:

MODS was a logical choice mostly my background (scientific publishers
=> MARC databases => MODS), and that BruceD'Arcus liked it.  Btw,
his blog is full of bibliographic articles, if you are interested:

   http://community.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/

(but it looks like he has switched over to RDF now)

I am not really set to any particular xml format, and there are
more mainstream choices (risx comes to mind).

But the few times I've had to work with TEI stuff I found that you
can easily get much more than you bargained for. Bibliographic data
is not easy on its own, and a format that allows (almost promotes)
extra tags to be embedded also is not helping at all.

Look at this:

   http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ref-author.html

Just the 'core' module is already pretty complex, but 'namesdates'
and 'linking' are definately also required for a useful bibliographic
database.

The nice, consise examples in the TEI docs are misleading because

   <author>Lucy Allen Paton</author>

is useless, more specifics are needed. We need at least this:

   <author>
     <persName>
       <forename>Lucy</forename>
       <forename>Allen</forename>
       <surname>Paton</surname>
     </persName>
   </author>

But with the use of <persName>, there are suddenly a gazillion
ways an author can encode the same name  (and it does not
preclude any of the other ways to encode a name).

   http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ND.html#NDPER

Etc. etc. Imagine having to support that in a simple context module.

Cheers, Taco


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