darcusblog

Mr. Kool is busy. From comments on the previous post:

BTW, there is also a screenshot for a MODS Tight GUI. It’s a quite complete approach, as in that you can edit all of the MODS Tight xml in it (eventually), but it’s also taking an enormous amount of screen real estate for it…

The result is:

I’ve long thought it not a good idea to try to model MODS too literally in a GUI. The trick with a bibliographic data model and the GUI that represents it to the user is that it needs to present users flexibility, but also clarity. The two exist in some tension.

So what kind of flexibility do I want as a user? The most important is flexible typing and relations. If I want to enter a paper presented at a conference, and later republished in a proceedings, I want my GUI to make it both possible to do this, and intuitive. No GUI I am aware of does either.

I still think a GUI can offer more constraint — and thus clarity — for users, rather following MODS too closely. For example, let’s say I create a record and start by telling the GUI that I am entering a “paper”. I have fields for author/creator and title and maybe subjects. I then can optionally add the metadata associated with a conference presentation. Likewise, I can then add some sort of “published in” relation and choose a proceedings, which gives me a title and publisher choices for those, and so forth. Finally, the GUI knows I need to add page numbers.

Personal names are tricky. In some ways it’s easier to just have a name field, and do “Doe, John” and have simple code that splits the name. But what if you need to indicate that the name is a transliterated Asian name, with a different sort order?

BTW, with respect to the data model, ideally many of this stuff would be normalized so that among other thing one could use auto-completion to deal with authors, publishers, and so forth.

So I want a flexible data model and GUI, but also that is clear. It should be possible to configure them too to determine the mix of metadata fields/properties associated with different kinds of named resources.

Tags: XML

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.