RE: [jats-list] index terms

["Beck, Jeff (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E]" <beck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Good Morning Garrit,

You question is quite timely. I'd like to give some background on the Book
Tag Set project here at NLM and now it relates to the NISO JATS and what
we are currently working on.

The NCBI Book tag set (http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/book/) was created as an
extension of the NLM DTDs for articles in 2004 primarily to support the
NCBI Bookshelf project. We released updated versions of the book model
based on updates to the NLM article DTDs up through version 3.0 in 2008.

At this time, we were working on getting the article models set up as a
formal standard through NISO. In the NISO process, we released two new
versions of the article models: NISO JATS 0.4 and 1.0 (which were both
backward-compatible updates to the NLM 3.0 models).

At this time we realized some things. The NCBI Book model had never been
through the type of review that the article models had been through; there
were a number of NCBI Bookshelf-specific items in them that were keeping
them from being adopted like the article models were being adopted. Also,
the book model was not part of the NISO Standardization project.

We held a meeting at NLM in the summer of 2011 to determine the best
course forward for the book model. The general decision was to build a
general (not NCBI-specific) book model based on the public release of the
NISO JATS 1.0 article model. Like the old NCBI book model, the models for
article body and book-part body (or chapter body) are very similar - with
the addition of book-specific items like the inline index-term that you
are interested in.

We've named the project the Book Interchange Tag Suite or BITS. Because it
was to be based on JATS 1.0, we are just now able to release a version. I
expect that we will be releasing a draft version of BITS before the
JATS-Con conference in mid October.

We will also be holding a book tagging panel discussion at JATS-Con this
year (http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con).

I hope this gives you some background on what we are planning. Please let
me know if you have any more questions.


Jeff Beck
Beck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


On 8/29/12 10:58 AM, "Imsieke, Gerrit, le-tex"
<gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

Looking at the book 3.0 tag set [1], I didn't see any vocabulary for
encoding inline index terms <C3><A0> la DocBook [2] or TEI [3].

I hoped to see these concepts in JATS 1.0 but it doesn't seem to cover
book peculiarities at all.

So there are essentially three questions for which I hope knowledgeable
list members may provide answers:

- What is the future path for the book tag set?

- Will it include index terms proper?

- Which markup alternatives (e.g., named-content) would you recommend
for the time being?

I'm asking because a German publisher whom I advise is already using NLM
for journal articles and they'd like to use essentially the same
vocabulary for books. My current advice would be to mix in either the
DocBook or the TEI vocabulary, or to go with named-content and a
controlled @content-type vocabulary., In the latter approach, you'd
probably encode something like "Anticonvulsants, Interactions"
(primary,
secondary) as
<named-content content-type="indexterm">Anticonvulsants<named-content
content-type="indexterm">Interactions</named-content></named-content>.
I don't like this approach because the named-content model is too
liberal for index terms. You'd have to use Schematron (which we're
using
anyway, so it'll still be acceptable).

Thanks for your insights & suggestions.

Gerrit

[1] http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/book/tag-library/3.0/index.html
[2] http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/indexterm.singular.html
[3] http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html#CONOIXgen

--
Gerrit Imsieke
Gesch<C3><A4>ftsf<C3><BC>hrer / Managing Director
le-tex publishing services GmbH
Weissenfelser Str. 84, 04229 Leipzig, Germany
Phone +49 341 355356 110, Fax +49 341 355356 510
gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:gerrit.imsieke@xxxxxxxxx>,
http://www.le-tex.de