[open-literature] Fwd: http://www.opencorrespondence.org/

[James Cummings]

On 27/07/10 20:48, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> Forwarding James' message to mailing list so we can discuss it here ...

Sorry if any of that (below) sounds negative... it was honestly meant in 
the spirit of constructive criticism.  And in answer to Iain's earlier 
message, yes I'd be happy to help getting the data into some neutral 
human-readable format like TEI XML.  (I'm obviously biased in this, my 
day job involves lots of TEI, and I'm currently an elected member of the 
TEI Consortium's technical council.)

-James

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: James Cummings
> Date: 22 July 2010 12:39
> Subject: http://www.opencorrespondence.org/
> To: info at okfn.org
>
> Hiya,
>
> Some feedback about your opencorrespondence.org site:
>
> a) Your 'Want to help out' link to
> http://www.opencorrespondence.org/get-involved ends in a 404.
> b) When looking at any individual letter your 'RDF version' is really
> misleading as this is only RDF of the metadata concerning the letter.
> I'm glad that there is open linked data (we're in the midst of doing
> something similar for data.ox.ac.uk) but maybe call it 'RDF metadata'?
> c) In rendering the letters as XHTML you use
> <pre><code>...</code></pre>  around what are commonly called openers
> and closers in letters.  This is semantically really quite icky, and
> as I'm sure you can appreciate those wanting to re-use the data would
> prefer you tag it in something that makes more sense. (See d))
> d) In reference to c) I don't know what underlying format you've
> encoded the letters in before, one hopes, generating the XHTML pages,
> but have you consider TEI P5 XML (http://www.tei-c.org/) as a
> semantically rich format for the underlying storage of the letters? It
> is a de facto international standard when it comes to marking up
> historical texts. It has elements for all the textual distinctions you
> would want to make, and more, and can easily be customised and
> constrained to suit your needs and to give you a tighter schema. I'm
> not saying you shouldn't use RDF as a linked data output, just that
> the underlying storage format should be richer. I'd also encourage you
> to release the underlying data for the letters in some structured,
> preferably XML, format so those wanting to use the letters as a corpus
> can do so.
> e) Your letters provide the date 0000-00-00 when presumably the date
> is unknown... wouldn't it be better to transform this to 'Unknown' or
> similar?
> f) http://www.opencorrespondence.org/letters/view/1 seems to be an error.
> g) I'm happy to give you help and advice in any of the above. If you
> have the letters as a whole in some XML/XHTML representation and want
> an XSLT transformation to semantically-richer markup I would be happy
> to attempt to write that for you.
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> -James
>
> --
> Dr James Cummings, Research Technologies Service
> OUCS, University of Oxford
>
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