[osis-core] key/keyref - Note

[Patrick Durusau]

Guys,

After poking around on key/keyref (again!) I think I know why it will 
not work for our use of osisIDs (and other identifiers).

The key/keyref mechanism depends upon the value of the key being 
specified at some certain location in the document instance, which is 
then found (using XPath) by the keyref. Thus, if I specify an SSN as the 
key, another part of the document, say my payroll information, can 
specify that an entry in that portion of the document must match that 
key. Essentially a check to make sure portions of the documents maintain 
consistent information.

In our case, however, we declare both osisID and osisRef using regex 
expressions, which means there will not be a place in the document 
where, Bible.KJV:Gen.1.1 appears as an osisID, other than the verse on 
which it is the osisID. To use key/keyref, we would have to enumerate 
all the keys to which we want keyrefs, something that I think is not 
likely to be workable.

That is not to say that key/keyref will not be useful for other things, 
like declarations of grammatical categories (a fairly small fixed set) 
but it will be limited to information that can be enumerated and not 
specified by a regex.

Sorry I did not realize this limitation sooner. Still, we have the regex 
validation and that should help in terms of getting syntax valid osisID 
and osisRef tokens.

Well, turning back to writing better prose for the schema, may try to 
have a trivial update out later today with better explanations.

Any problems with the latest release?

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu