[uf-discuss] hCite progress

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 11/13/06, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) The term "Pages" i think that actually has two meanings which i
> have confused in the implied schema. The first being "This book is 45
> pages long" which is metadata about the book, and is in the realm of
> media-info microformat. Then there is "this sites pages 43-45" meaning
> a location. So now we need figure out what we are to do?

Pages to indicate the length of a book should be beyond scope. It's
not relevant to citations.

Beyond that, there are two kinds of locators of this sort:

1) to indicate the place of an item within a larger container

2) so-called "point locators" which indicate specific
pages/paragraphs/etc. within a cited item; typically included in
citations (Doe, 1999, p12).

For the best balance of simplicity and generality, I'd suggest just
"pages." Don't worry about start and end because, as you noted, pages
can be discontinuous.

> 2) one of the manditory properties across several different citation
> formats is TYPE. Is this a Book, Journal entry, Thesis, Video, etc.
> Usually and enumerated list of values. The issue is that EVERYONE does
> it differently...

And from my own experience, this is not at all easy to do. I've been
talking about this issue of late with the Zotero guys, because every
week people keep asking for more types on their forums. But if you
just keep adding them without some kind of design logic -- and a
mapping to the formatting system and its type logic -- you end up with
a mess.

So, I do think a list is important, but I suggest that this not be the
focus for hCite 1.0, and maybe see if we can find some agreement as a
separate effort.

Bruce