Dear All,

The purpose of this e-mail is to probe the general sentiments concerning
my usage of tagUsage and to gather the bits of feedback that I missed
after my TEI-MM presentation.

Context: FreeDict, a project hosting numerous diverse bilingual
dictionaries that badly need common constraints. Some of the constraints
refer to the usage of gramGrp children. In particular, I have made it so
that if you choose to use e.g. <pos>, its contents have to be uniform
throughout the dictionary, and restricted to what you enumerate in your
<tagUsage>. Example:

<tagUsage gi="pos">
  <list>
    <item ana="FreeDict_ontology.xml#f_pos_noun">n</item>
    <item ana="FreeDict_ontology.xml#f_pos_verb">v</item>
    <item ana="FreeDict_ontology.xml#f_pos_imit">imit</item>
  </list>
</tagUsage>
<tagUsage gi="gen">
  <list>
    <item ana="FreeDict_ontology.xml#f_gen_fem">f</item>
    <item ana="FreeDict_ontology.xml#f_gen_masc">m</item>
  </list>
</tagUsage>

In this particular dictionary, three values are possible for <pos>, and
two for its sister <gen>. If others appear, Schematron complains. The
@ana attributes are a separate part of the general story: they align the
values that the particular dictionary uses ("m", "msc", "masc", etc.) to
a single reference value (in this case, "masculine").

Question: how outraged are you after looking at the above? My point in
the TEI-MM presentation was that this particular decision might be
counted as re-use of tagUsage[1] rather than its *ab*use.

Lou voted for the latter, and suggested that I am confusing the XML
sense of "tag" (roughly, "label for an XML element")[2], and the
linguistic sense (= "label for various grammatical features"). But it
seems to me that whether I do is a matter of perspective: indeed I
regularise the usage of linguistic tags (for part of speech and gender),
which happen to be the content of XML elements <pos> and <gen>. Thus, I
also regularise the usage of TEI tags/elements "pos" and "gen" in this
particular dictionary. Is this enough to defend my handling of tagUsage
as *re-*use? In other words, is the information on the content of <pos>
and its kin completely out-of-place under tagsDecl?

I got a suggestion for an alternative placement, and I thought I heard
"appInfo", but now I think I must have misunderstood: I don't see how
appInfo[3] could serve my purpose, which has nothing to do with
applications modifying dictionaries. May I ask the person who suggested
this (it may have been Lou) to possibly elaborate, or more likely to
correct my recollection of the potential alternative placement?

Many thanks in advance,

  Piotr

[1]: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-tagUsage.html

[2]: I'm ignoring the sense implied in terms "opening tag" and "closing
tag", which refer to the physical markup. It seems to me that tagsDecl
and tagUsage refer to the more abstract sense of "identifier".

[3]: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-appInfo.html