ObjectWG

This is the proposal by Torsten Schassan, Oyvind Eide, and others for an Object Working Group. Please place comments on the 'Discussion' page.

A working group (WG) on the matter will have to consider whether:


 * it will restrain itself to the description of objects that carry texts (in a broad sense) or allow for the description of objects of any kind;
 * it wants to incorporate the manuscript description elements in the content model of an element (or the like, to be created). Such a hierarchy would follow the examples of the, , and elements (ch. 13) which serve as a space to collect information about a person, organisation, or place and to which is referred by , , and  elements.
 * the manuscript description elements could be extended to cover the description of objects of all kinds or whether the existing elements and the existing hierarchy of elements represent cataloguing traditions that make it difficult to cover other objects than (western medieval) manuscripts.
 * the fact that a description of an object could be either metadata or data has any influence on the structure of the markup of the descrription or whether the same elements could be used in either places. (i.e. relationship between TEI documents and objects)

The WG has to take the following steps:


 * 1) get in touch with non-manuscript communities in order to find out about missing elements and attributes, needed or misleading structures within the description or the possibilities to use the manuscript description structures at all for their purposes.
 * 2) find out about the possibilities to just reword the chapter on msdescription and by this cover objects of other kinds
 * 3) decide upon the integration of the object description in the chapter on entities (person, org, place) or to leave it separate.
 * 4) prepare an ODD which represents the forseen changes

Materials that have to be taken into consideration:


 * http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/326/ to establish  and for (real world) objects mentioned in texts
 * http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/187/ discussion on 

Schedule
 * 2014 Jan - 2014 Jul/Oct: Review of ch. 10 (msdescription) and exchange with non-mss communities, decision whether to integrate it in ch. 13
 * 2014 Oct - 2015 Oct: establish a text and prepare ODD

The WG should meet face-to-face at least twice in order to review the existing wording in the first step and finalise a proposal for the TEI Council in the second step. Possible occasions might be any major DH meeting, e.g. 26-28 March 2014 in Passau, 7-12 July 2014 in Lausanne, 20-25 October 2014 TEI MM

The WG might have a look at the semantical representation of the description of objects e.g. through CIDOC-CRM. The WG might consider to propose a way to allow for negative expressions such as "There are no illustrations present".