Comic Schemata

Hi folks,
  I took a look at the http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/Periodicals_and_Comics_synthesis as suggested and have a few questions and comments.  Some of these are really basic questions about the schema goals a process.  I did go through the comics-related emails in the archive for the past few months to catch up a bit, but I haven't read the entire rather large volume of emails that didn't specifically say "comics" in the subject line.  So feel free to tell me to go read some other documentation, or to send some answers off-list.

This definitely does a good job of covering the essentials, which I gather is the goal.  So now I'll nitpick at details :-P

One really basic question is how much precision are you going for here?  I am guessing less than the GCD, which wants all the precision :-)  Do you have a feel for the point at which it's fine to stuff things in a "notes" field?  In practice, this generally boils down to "should people be able to search for this thing?"

Some general concerns about the definition:
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The description of "Comics" given at http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/Periodicals_and_Comics_synthesis#Comics , if read literally, is extremely specific to typical modern U.S. periodical comics.

The restrictions on binding and size, while helpful to give the general idea, will break down pretty rapidly looking over the entire history of US comics.  It also doesn't fit typical European (nor, I imagine, Asian) formats all that well, although perhaps some of those fit better under GraphicNovel?  Is the goal here to handle published sequential art in general, or just the US market and things that are similar enough, with other schemas for bande-dessinée, manga, etc.?

Hierarchy:
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I see that each level (Comic, ComicSeries, ComicIssue, ComicStory) can link to all of the levels above or below it.  Is this just to support the full range of possible "joins" (to borrow from SQL) more easily?  Or do you expect that some levels will be omitted.  Would a comic published as a one-shout (per the indicia) with only one story in it just have a Comic and a ComicIssue and no ComicSeries or ComicStory?  Is this why ComicIssue and ComicStory have many duplicate fields?  Example of such a one-shot:  http://www.comics.org/issue/1143352/

How are searches expected to handle creator data being at either of two possible levels?  (again, apologies if this is obvious to folks who have been working on this stuff for a while).

I see in the examples that these things are shown nesting in XML.  Does this mean that none of the connections are many-to-many?  With issues and stories that can be useful for variants (although that's not how the GCD does it on the back-end).  There are examples of issues as part of multiple series (the GCD has never implemented that, although there are intentions).  Of course duplicating data is also an option- if that's the plan for variants then you're probably fine with it for the series case- it's fairly rare.  I can pull up examples if anyone wants some, though.

I've already commented that I think the "Comic" concept as stated is a bit problematic, although I'm still contemplating that.  Probably worth its own thread, maybe tomorrow.

ComicIssue and ComicStory:
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I noticed discussion of an Article type.  Is there a particular reason why ComicStory does not correlate to Article?

At the GCD we have found it much easier to model the cover as a type of ComicStory.  They need the entire set of credits (especially when you get to cases like http://www.comics.org/issue/85/cover/4/ where the cover is a complete story, or ones where the cover is the first page of a story that continues inside (I can't recall an example off the top of my head).

Looks like multiple contributors of the same role should work fine here.  What about pen names?  Is this intended to record it as credited, by an authoritative name, or both?  I'm assuming "Person" handles some notion of name changes or nicknames/sobriquets.  I should probably go find the definition of the Person type...

Is there any interest in capturing information about editors or other roles?

I think it would be a good idea to allow job codes as a local ID space on stories similar to distributor codes on issues.
Here's an illustration of INDUCKS' prominent use of job/story codes: http://coa.inducks.org/index.php
AtlasTales http://atlastales.com/search and the GCD also allow searching by job codes.

Is the "format" field free-form?  That's given the GCD a lot of headache over the years, although it depends on the attempted resolution.  If you're just going for comic vs book vs album vs (I dont know what the Asian formats are) you'll probably get reasonable data.

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I had another section on "imprint" but decided that it could use its own thread.  I'll post that shortly.  I'll also write separately on GraphicNovel at some point.

cheers,
-henry