Motivation: Gerund or Infinitive

During today's call there was discussion about motivations - what form should they take. For those of you who were not on the call I want to be clear, nobody is talking about going back to subclassing, everyone is happy (as far as I can tell) to express motivation as an instance of oa:Motivation (a subclass of skos:Concept).   There is still discussion however about whether these should be nouns or verbs, e.g.  "highlighting" or "highlight" -  and let's be clear here, "highlighting" is the noun and "highlight" is the verb - "highlighting" is a gerund (which is a noun) and "highlight" is short for "to highlight", the infinitive form.  This seems to cause some confusion so rather than talk about "noun vs. verb"  I suggest that we express the issue as "gerund vs. infinitive form".

I prefer the infinitive form, and there are others who also prefer it, though I don't know how many. I have not heard anyone say that they prefer the gerund form, for reasons other than that they don't care one way or the other, that's the way it is now,  and so why change it. (Though I am not trying to speak for everyone so if someone has a substantive reason please speak up.)

Anyway, here is my point.  Ivan's argument against changing this seemed to be that it would create a lot of work for us, namely editing, and we should not create editing work without good reason.   My question is, what editing would be required, other than to the table in 3.4 and also a few examples?    I think it would take about 20 minutes worth of work and I would be happy to volunteer to do it.

Ray

Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2015 19:55:18 UTC