Re: Bibliographic Databases

["Bruce D\\'Arcus" <bdarcus.lists@gmail.com>]

Taco Hoekwater <taco <at> elvenkind.com> writes:

[snip]

> 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.

... MODS has some of these issues too. Consider these are both valid:

<name type="personal">
  <namePart>Jane Doe</namePart>
  <role>
    <roleTerm type="text">creator</roleTerm>
  </role>
</name>

<name type="personal">
  <namePart type="given">Jane</namePart>
  <namePart type="family">Doe</namePart>
  <role>
    <roleTerm type="text">creator</roleTerm>
  </role>
</name>

So in many formats there's a balance between flexibility and
brevity/predictability. 

FWIW, I've just settled on RDF for my own data needs between it provides the
formal rigor of relational databases (that XML per se lacks), but much more
flexibility. 

But as I said in the previous note, I don't think the data format has to matter
that much to formatting software (at its core that is).

Bruce

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