Re: Style

But IMO it doesn't resonate with the needs of data annotation at the
record level. In our case this is potentially  the digital records
describing each the 2.5 billion specimens estimated to be held by the
world's natural history collections.  The current some several hundred
million such digital records (the rest are on paper) are littered with
errors for many reasons, and we are using machine- and human-generated
annotations to make assertions about how erroneous, incomplete, or
conflicting records can be transformed into those more fit for one or
another purpose (as well as to help accelerate the 10-year worldwide
project to get the rest of the specimen descriptions digitized).  In
the community doing this, there are several important XML-Schemas and
RDFS or OWL DL ontologies that have been in play for quite a few years
and there is \typically/ a need for our annotations to express rather
arbitrary transformations, or at the very least, for it to be
machine-deducible that the annotations  are germane to a
transformation of the oa:Target.

<StrongOpinion>
Basically, our current need is for data annotation to address
fitness-for-purpose, and my guess is that most people annotating
documents also have that motivation. But it's hard to see how to model
fitness-for-purpose without reference to knowledge representation in
the domain of the Body and Topic.  From this perspective, I continue
to believe that Style doesn't belong in an annotation knowledge
representation---I see it as just a tool based on thousands of years
of document production, by which an ao:Annotator is hiding some
fitness-for-use concept that is potentially integrable with someone
else's  were it only clearer why the Annotator designated, or cared
about, that style.  But, if you are able to, e.g. express that your
red stuff is meant to denote that this part of the document signals
something the consuming agent should somehow care about, why shouldn't
that concern be expressed with something less context sensitive than
"text has red background color".
</StrongOpinion>

To the extent that my StrongOpinion analysis is shared, it is perhaps
an argument that Style belongs in oax.

Bob Morris



On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Shannon Bradshaw
<shannon.bradshaw@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Instead of attaching to the Specific Resource, oa:hasStyle would
>> attach to the Annotation.
>
>
> +1 from me.
>
>>
>> The current requirements from the use cases and stakeholders are only
>> for describing stylistic or rendering features, rather than arbitrary
>> transformations.  For example, red strike-through and yellow
>> background is required, but we don't have a strong case for
>> transformation of arbitrary XML into HTML or JPEG into PNG.
>
>
> This description resonates with the needs of our user community.
>
> -Shannon
>
>



-- 
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390

IT Staff
Filtered Push Project
Harvard University Herbaria
Harvard University

email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
===
The content of this communication is made entirely on my
own behalf and in no way should be deemed to express
official positions of The University of Massachusetts at Boston or
Harvard University.

Received on Sunday, 5 August 2012 18:59:08 UTC