RE: case for abstract?

I agree that abstract is most commonly used in publishing in scholarly content, and there, almost always in journals. Books are just now beginning to acquire abstracts (in the past very few books contained them, though some did), and there they are often treated as metadata, not rendered content. In a journal article, an abstract is almost always a clearly distinguished structural element in the rendered content—which, btw, almost always has a heading identifying it explicitly as the abstract, which of course AT would read. And even then, in JATS, the XML model overwhelmingly used for almost all journal articles, the article abstract is in the <article-meta>, the "metadata header" at the beginning of every JATS XML article, from which it is retrieved for rendering. (Figures and tables can also have <abstract>s.)

So imo there are better reasons to exclude "abstract" from the vocabulary than to include it, given the conflict with ARIA's use of the term.

From: Matt Garrish [mailto:matt.garrish@bell.net]
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2015 10:30 PM
To: public-digipub-ig@w3.org
Cc: public-dpub-aria@w3.org
Subject: Re: case for abstract?

Oops, meant to send this to the dpub ig, but keeping both lists on since it seems appropriate to both...

From: Matt Garrish<mailto:matt.garrish@bell.net>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2015 10:26 PM
To: public-dpub-aria@w3.org<mailto:public-dpub-aria@w3.org>
Subject: case for abstract?

In the interests of solving abstract, the first question I’d ask is: is it critical for the first iteration of this vocabulary?

It was a term that was introduced in epub for education, and it seems more suited to scholarly and education publishing. I’m not even sure the last time I spotted an abstract outside of those contexts, or specifications, at any rate. We’re not trying to cover everything, and there are absences like dedication that seem more commonly usable.

Should it be punted to future discussions about stem/scholarly, as we’ve similarly passed on assessments, learning-* and statement?

And if anyone is using it currently in their EPUBs, please feel free to make a case for or against swapping in summary. I’ve said my fill on where I think we’ll run into ambiguity with that term in the other thread, but I don’t have any skin in the game and talking theory is about as useful as spouting hot air.

Matt