Re: IAFA templates: a user's comment

[Thomas Krichel <[e-mail]>]

  Jon Knight writes:

> Author-Name-v2: Leonid Rostrywizkdgt
> Author-Email-v2: [e-mail]
> Author-Job-Title-v2: Spelling Advisor
> Author-Department-v2: Spelling and Grammer
> Author-Work-Postal-v2: TypeRight Ltd, Clickerty Street, London, UK.

  But what if poor Leonid has two employers? Would we write

  Author-Department-v2-v1: Spelling and Grammer
  Author-Department-v2-v2: Slug and Lettuce

  Certainly we could not write

  Author-Department-v3:

  because with two authors and three workplaces, it would be impossible
  to see for the user who works where. Note that the situation of multiple
  affiliation is quite common in Economics. Many of the top people not 
  only work for a University Department but are also affiliated to a 
  research organisation. These people must mention these cos they are 
  proud of it.

  One solution I can see is to repeat the field, such as to say:

  Author-Department-v2: Spelling and Grammer
  Author-Department-v2: Slug and Lettuce

  This could also solve the problem that I used as a second example, 
  where I wrote:

ToK> URL-v0-p1: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.nroff
ToK> URL-v0-p2: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.gif
ToK> URL-v1-p1: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.txt
ToK> URL-v1-p2: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.gif

  so therefore I would repeat the URL's for the second entry:

  URL-v0: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.nroff
  URL-v0: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.gif
  URL-v1: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.txt
  URL-v1: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.gif

  Would the gurus assembled here accept this as good practice? Note
  that it would make a problem when it comes to describe the format
  of a variants, because  the component of a variant could be in
  a different form, as suggested in this example.

  Format-v0:   nroff
  Format-v0:   gif
  Format-v1:   ASCII
  Format-v1:   gif

  The problem with this is that the position of the fields becomes imporant.
  Imagine

  Format-v0:   gif
  URL-v0: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.nroff
  Format-v0:   nroff
  URL-v0: ftp://highgate.london.uk/manifest.gif

  What is the gif and what is the nroff file? Some fool could have given
  the gif the ending  nroff!

> Note that some fields in the cluster may be blank and they're all plaintext
> so having things like ``and'' to join the entries together gets messy (and
> the things like ``Spelling and Grammer'' in Author-Department-v2 would
> screw it up unless there was some form of and-escaping).

  Why not replace the and linking components with a +? OK, C++ Inc would
  make a problem, but then again I can think of very few organisations that
  that have a + sign in the name. 

> >   The word "abstract" would be better suited when we describe documents,
> >   rather then talking about "description". I would suggest to allow
> >   the word abstract as a synonym for description otherwise we will
> >   have a hard time convincing people to give up on the word abstract.
> 
> Hmm, careful: abstract!=description.  I think Abstract should be a
> separate field that is the abstract provided by the author of the resource
> the template is pointing to.  In my mind Description is something that the
> template creator usually generates that provides useful meta information
> (eg: ``This document is part of a series of 16 technical reports by the
> same authors that should all be read together'').  Adding a new field is a
> low overhead way of handling this.  Fields are cheap after all :-)

  Yes, but if everybody creates their own fields, chaos would result. I think
  that this distinction between description and abstract should be made
  clear in the document, and the term description may be replaced by comment
  to mean any comment of the author. That is a field we are using with WoPEc
  at the moment. 

  Cheers, 


  Thomas Krichel                              mailto::[e-mail]
                                    http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/~lgecstk/ToK.html