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Subject: Comments on the Fundamental Requirements page in the wiki
Hi Fabio,
Here are some comments on the vocabulary. I like the words, have some suggestions on the definitions.
1. Should we define a term for “the thing being cited?” Perhaps “resource.” I suggest some definition because we’ll likely find ourselves at least occasionally talking about behaviors around what is being cited and having a generic term that we’ve defined may be helpful there. The term would also encompass ‘part of a document’ in addition to ‘the document.’ And it may help us to think of citable things as more than just documents or sections of documents.
2. citation and reference - the distinction between these two is very important and I’m glad that you have captured it in the text.
3. For citation, I suggest changing the first sentence “an explicit, plain-text, human-readable mention of a legal text as found in another text… ” to “an explicit, plain-text, human-readable mention in a text referring to a resource located somewhere else (whether the same document or a different document)…” I think that makes the relationship a bit more clear (‘this’ points you to ‘that’) and also broadens the scope of the resource from a text to, for example, the starting frame in a video offered as evidence in a criminal trial. (That’s out there as an example, but just to suggest that we may want to think beyond the written word.)
4. For citation, I suggest replacing the word ‘deixis’ (which I had to look up and then roll the definition around in my head for several minutes) to a word more common? Perhaps ‘contextual’ which seems close to the meaning at least to me. Also, how does ‘implicit’ differ from ‘deixis’? I see the difference in the example but I think in practice they might get mixed up.
5. For identifier, I think we should also note that (a) resources are not necessarily guaranteed to have identifiers and (b) that identifiers cannot be guaranteed to be unique?
6. For locator, two suggestions - that we generalize it from just urls and that we stick here to the term’s definition and not comment on its suitability for references.
I’m thinking of something more like this: “locator: a string containing instructions (e.g. protocol, address, filename) that can be used to access a resource. Locators are strongly dependent on technical, architectural and organizational choices of the owner of the system in which the resource is to be found.”
I could see how a citation might, in the computer catalog of a large library, resolve not to an electronic address but to a set of instructions telling the reader where on the shelves to find the cited work.
Also, I agree with the statement of the purpose of the last sentence but I think that it should move down to follow after the definitions.
7. For deference, I agree with the definition but suggest we make it more general. “the action of delivering a copy of the resource specified by the locator, for example, by traversing a link to deliver a copy to the requesting application.
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