[MEI-L] [Time uncertainty; WAS] feature request list (long)

[Byrd, Donald A.]

All--

I have a question about the proposed description of historical 
information. Forgive me for this _very_ belated response; I hope it's 
still useful... I wonder if we need more ways to describe uncertainty. 
Other than including the "natural language" version of a date, it looks 
like the only ways to describe uncertainty in the current plans are the 
@notBefore and @notAfter attributes. But other ways are already widely 
used. Sec. 22.17A, "rules and approximation methods for dates", of 
AACR2R (the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed. revised) includes 
examples like "1836 or 7-1896", "fl. 1893-1940", and "12th cent." 
(meaning -- AACR2R says -- years of birth and death unknown, years of 
activity unknown, century known). And what about cases where there's 
evidence for two dates that aren't adjacent? For example, Henry 
Cowell's The Tides of Manaunaun, was one of the first pieces to employ 
large tone clusters, was probably written in 1917, but Cowell claimed 
he'd written it in 1912 (perhaps to make it seem even more original). 
This suggests either attributes to represent specific alternative 
dates, or perhaps "known wrong" dates. Also, some existing time formats 
-- I forget which -- allow replacing one or more trailing digits of the 
year with a question mark: for example, "17??" means some year in the 
1700's. And so on. But, Daniel, I'm quite sure you thought about all of 
this when you were designing the EAC format, so I suspect there's less 
need for additional methods than I think!

--Don


On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 10:12:01 +0200, Daniel Röwenstrunk 
<roewenstrunk at edirom.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> just one short comment to the history discussion. I would like to
> have a text explaining that event, but with all features a paragraph
> offers (using date, persname, geogname, etc. for encoding everything
> you like). And I would like to have a defined structure for the most
> basic information of an event: the date, time or date range. This
> information could be certain (@when (or any other name for that
> thing), @from and @to) or uncertain (@notBefore and @notAfter). From
> my point of view I would like to use attributes more than a date
> element because it handles the same information (except the human
> readable, language specific form like "1. April im Jahre 2010", but
> this could be part of the text inside event) and don't force you to
> have a eventdesc element inside event.
>
> Daniel
>
> PS: the @when attribute could be named to @date
>
>
>
> Am 31.03.2010 um 20:45 schrieb Johannes Kepper:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> my comments are spread over Daniel's and Daniel's replies?
>>
>>
>> Am 31.03.2010 um 18:47 schrieb Daniel Pitti:
>>
>>> In my view it is either too structured or insufficiently structure. It
>>> depends on what you intend to do with the information: indexing,
>>> rendering (just as a list; or perhaps as a timeline; or perhaps as a
>>> timeline/map combination) or analysis.
>>>
>>> Dates, for example, can be quite complex: single or range? Certain or
>>> uncertain? And to make the data "operational," one would want it
>>> constrained using some union of W3C datatypes. If you want a timeline/
>>> map combination, then you would probably want the date and geographic
>>> name independent of the event. You probably also want to be able to
>>> give dates in natural language as well as machine-readable form.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, if all you want to do is display a list, then you
>>> do not need <persname> and <geogname>.
>>
>> I don't think that we should worry too much about
>> application-specific implementations of this feature. It should
>> cover everything necessary for more or less simple eventlists, but
>> it is not intended to lay the foundations for a highly sophisticated
>> eventlist encoding XML standard. If a project needs more than what
>> MEI offers, it has to use a different approach (METS or whatever).
>> But we should take care that this situation is only an edge case,
>> not the standard way for every project. I think it's good to have a
>> compromise like this (although I'm not married with this particular
>> solution).
>>
>>>
>>> For a very structured timeline, see <chronItem> (component of
>>> <chronList>) in the EAC-CPF schema:
>>> http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/eac/cpf/tagLibrary/cpfTagLibrary.html#d1e1630
>>>
>>
>> Our reason not to use <chronList> / <chronItem> / <chron*> was that
>> it implies a chronological order (surprise!), but we wanted a more
>> unspecific kind of event list that could cover simultaneous events
>> as well as events of unknown order or dating.
>>
>>> (The examples unfortunately do not have one with a <placeEntry>, but I
>>> think you will get the idea).
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 31, 2010, at 11:27 AM, Daniel Röwenstrunk wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> to keep things simple and short what about a structure like that
>>>> (concerning item 8):
>>>>
>>>> <eventlist type="composition">
>>>>
>>>> <event when="1812-03-25" type="composition">
>>>>  Completed sketch in <geogname>My Little Town</geogname>
>>>> </event>
>>>>
>>>> <event when="1812-06-26" type="dedication">
>>>>  Dedicated to <persname>his wife</persname> on <date>June 26,
>>>> 1812</date>
>>>> </event>
>>>> </eventlist>
>>
>> I see what you're getting at. First: I wasn't sure if we really need
>> a defined element to encode place information for events. (@Perry: I
>> know, it was suggested by me ;-). I see arguments for having it as
>> well as not having it, but as it is optional in our proposal, I
>> guess it won't hurt too much.
>> Regarding the dating mechanism: As Daniel P. pointed out, dates are
>> complicated things. We already have an element dedicated to date
>> encoding in MEI, and I prefer to use that one also on eventlists
>> over the simplicity of copying it's functionality to the event
>> itself. By using the separate element, we may encode the "natural
>> language" version of the date mentioned by Daniel P. as the
>> element's content. If we use only attributes, we don't have this
>> opportunity. I don't know if we really need it, but I would prefer a
>> separate date.
>>
>>
>> Johannes
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We would need the following elements and attributes:
>>>>
>>>> eventlist (with @type, @n) contains event*
>>>> event (with @type, @n, @when, @notBefore, @notAfter, @from, @to)
>>>> contains everything a p-element could contain
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Daniel
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Am 30.03.2010 um 20:26 schrieb Roland, Perry (pdr4h):
>>>>
>>>>> Finally, item 8.  Johannes and I propose adding eventlist, event,
>>>>> and eventdesc elements.  From the attached .odt file:
>>>>>
>>>>> "Eventlist contains historical information given as a sequence of
>>>>> significant past events. <eventlist> contains <event> elements that
>>>>> pair a date or date range with a brief description of the
>>>>> associated event and locations where the event took place. An
>>>>> <eventlist> describes events associated with a work when it appears
>>>>> in the <profiledesc> element or events associated with the
>>>>> custodial history of a given copy of a source for the encoding when
>>>>> it appears within the <source> element.
>>>>>
>>>>> Event groups a date, a description of the event related to the
>>>>> date, and optionally, any number of places where the event took
>>>>> place.
>>>>>
>>>>> Eventdesc describes or names something that happened."
>>>>>
>>>>> Usage examples:
>>>>>
>>>>> <profiledesc>
>>>>> <eventlist type="composition">
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date reg="1812-03-25"/>
>>>>>   <geogname>My Little Town</geogname>
>>>>>   <eventdesc n="composition">
>>>>>     Completed sketch
>>>>>   </eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date reg="1812-06-26"/>
>>>>>   <eventdesc n="dedication">Dedicated to <persname>his wife</
>>>>> persname>.</eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date reg="1813"/>
>>>>>   <eventdesc>Published</eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> </eventlist>
>>>>> <eventlist type="reception">
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date reg="1814-04-01"/>
>>>>>   <geogname>The State Theater</geogname>
>>>>>   <eventdesc>1st performance</eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date reg="1814-04-01"/>
>>>>>   <eventdesc>1st bad review</eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> </eventlist>
>>>>> </profiledesc>
>>>>>
>>>>> <provenance>
>>>>> <eventlist>
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date notafter="1985">until 1986</date>
>>>>>   <eventdesc>Weber family </eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> <event>
>>>>>   <date notbefore="1986">1986-</date>
>>>>>     <eventdesc>owned by the <repository>Berlin State Library</
>>>>> repository></eventdesc>
>>>>> </event>
>>>>> </eventlist>
>>>>> </provenance>
>>>>>
>>>>> <profiledesc> allows multiple lists, hence the need for @type to
>>>>> distinguish them.  <provenance> on the other hand only allows a
>>>>> single list.
>>>>>
>>>>> Within profiledesc, creation permits a "text-y" description of the
>>>>> creation of the work, while eventlist offers a more structured,
>>>>> more easily machine-processed approach.  Either or both are
>>>>> permitted.  In provenance, however, one method must be selected.
>>>>>
>>>>> Notice that event permits only a single date element.  This can
>>>>> contain a single date or a date range.  However, an event cannot
>>>>> have multiple, discontinuous dates.  In our estimation, this
>>>>> situation implies multiple events.
>>>>
>
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--
Donald Byrd
Senior Scientist
Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics & Music
Indiana University, Bloomington