Sticky Stuff

Please Note:

* equivalent to same FRBR Group 1 Entity.

** equivalent to same FRBR Group 2 Entity.

*** equivalent to same FRBR Group 3 Entity.

Bibliographic Group

Agents Group

Semantic & Lexical Group

Temporal Group

Physical Group

Locus Group

Content Group

Documentation Group

BMF Group

Data and Metadata

The idea that data and metadata are interchangeable is both natural and astonishing at the same time.

We think of metadata as a description of something else, in the way that a card in a library catalog is an external description of a resource in a library.

But a collection of bibliographic data on a particular subject becomes a bibliography which is a work in it's own right. The title page in a book, the liner notes in an album or a telephone directory all can be thought of as data in one context or metadata in another.

If metadata and data are indeed interchangeable, then metadata is not inherently external. This leads us to a very different concept of metadata.

Metadata is not simply a description of data, but a less detailed view of that data. Metadata is data seen at a distance.

Library and Book

The illusion of the distinction between document and library is in large part a by-product of the limits of physical media and Caxton's printing press.

Before Caxton, the distinction between a work and library was far less clear as was authorial ownership of documents and all sorts of other assumptions that we take for granted today. We'll come back to this point again later.

Once you have digitized all the works in a library and placed them within a single framework, the distinction is far less clear.

For example, in a digital library you can have one index rather than a different index at the end of every document. The table of contents, which is a tree, can be merged together with all of the other table of contents of all works in the library into a single tree.

The library catalog can be merged with all of the works they describe so that a bibliographic record is a description of a work at a distance.

Links between documents can lead directly to any part of any other document without the reader having to open the document like the cover of a book, work out the organization of the work and only then find the passage that was being referenced.

Work and Part

Many books and sound recordings are not mutually exclusive, but are collections of a number of smaller documents or songs which could easily stand on their own.

In some cases, the collection itself has value as a work in it's own right, but this does not take away from the fact that the parts could stand on their own.

Encyclopedia articles, main entries in dictionaries, newspaper stories and even chapters in many books could stand on their own without the reader needing to see any other part of the collection.

Many collections are for the sole purpose of making the amount of content that is sold on physical media viable as a commercial product. Sound recordings are well known for including songs of dubious quality to make a album with a few popular singles long enough to sell as an album and justify a themed concert tour.

But the MP3 revolution and more recently iTunes and the iPod have brought back a new age of singles. iTunes are the digital equivalent of old 45rpm records which were the backbone of the recording industry during the 50's and 60's when radio was the chief marketing vehicle for music.

The first decade of the World Wide Web was based in large part on the idea of a Web Site being a mutually exclusive collection of information. In effect, Web Sites were treated as self-contained works like a physical book. Imposing the limits of physical media on electronic media is a theme which has been repeated over and over.

For the Web, RSS [Rich Site Syndication Format] blew this idea out of the water by breaking up content so that individual articles on the Web could stand on their own, irrespective of the Web Site which published it.

Text and Commentary

The relationship between text and commentary is probably as old as texts themselves.

Commentary can take all sorts of forms, such as foot-notes, glosses scribbled in the margins of a book, or notes made while reading a book for a class. Commentary can be as small as a single word or a multi-volume work composed by an army of scholars.

The commentary made by an authoritative person with lots of letters tagged on the end of their name and published along with a document, are not functionally or practically any different than notes scribbled by a high school student doing their homework on the kitchen table.

Such commentary is often a marketing function for a publisher, who is trying to add value to a work (which might be in the public domain) to try to coax readers to purchase their edition over another.

This is not to say that such commentary is not useful or important. It is enormously important to provide context and insight into texts which were based on common knowledge used within a narrow discipline or general knowledge from a past age.

Once commentary is understood to be simply a text, which has as a subject another text, irrespective of who wrote it or how it is published, then all commentary becomes an extension of and part of a work and by extension, the collective content of a library.

It could be said that the Internet itself is all commentary. Email between friends, or in a discussion group on Usenet or on a list-server, threaded comments on Slashdot⁸, tags and comments about images on Flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, reviews on Amazon Books, and of course the entire blogsphere is all a relentless tidal current of commentary that ebbs and flows across the planet as each timezone passes from day into night.

Text and Code

Everything in Lisp is a list. There is no useful distinction in Lisp between the code and the data it is processing.⁹

The expression (+ 2 2) which is the way you write "2 + 2" in Lisp is a list with three elements where the first item is a symbol which represents a function ("+" is the name of a function which adds numbers together) and the second and third items are the numbers "2" and "2".

Documents which are marked up as Lisp data structures can be thought of in one context as a document, and in another as a program which can be evaluated (or invoked) to get a result.

To understand this, think of Harry Potter who lives in a world where magic is real. In Harry Potter's world, a device like a wand, is used to invoke spells which are spoken. This results in some kind of action which can be anything from levitating a chair, to erasing someone's memories.

Among other things, magic is based on the premise that human language, when used by someone with the appropriate skill and innate ability, has the power to effect the physical world around us. Speaking, or incanting a spell invokes unseen powers which can move and manipulate physical objects.

This belief is as old as humanity. Written texts in some contexts are believed to have magical powers in their own right. Sacred texts like the Bible are thought by believers to have the power to protect them from evil, and invoke supernatural powers.

I am writing this paper using Emacs, a text editor written in Lisp. I can move my cursor next to the expression (+ 2 2) on the screen and invoke the expression with a tap of my wand (by holding down the Control key and typing "x e"). The number "4" is returned in a window at the bottom of the frame.

A hypertext link on a Web page behaves in a similar way. When you click on a link and the browser opens up another page, you are invoking the link made between two documents.

The distinction between text and code will gradually fade. Twenty years from now, we could well have a generation of children who will have a difficult time thinking of a text as being an inert chunk of information permanently stamped on physical media.¹⁰

The Lisp REPL

Lisp is a programing language which has been around since 1958. In fact the only programming language older than Lisp which still in active use is Fortran. Lisp was far ahead of it's time. Many of it's most powerful features have only been introduced into more popular languages like Perl and Python in the last few years. Many people still consider Lisp to be more powerful than any other programming language. The Read, Evaluate, Print Loop (REPL) is a part of the Lisp development environment for writing Lisp programs.

So why are we using the term REPL? After all, we could just as easily call it the "Search, Process, Publish Cycle" or SPPC. Is there a reason for using such obscure hardcore geek terminology? Well, yes.

The REPL embodies both the human process, as well as the machine process and keeps in mind our fifth principle that there is no useful distinction between text and code.

A Simple Example of the REPL

One of the most simple and elegant examples of the REPL is found in practically every office on every desk in the form of the ubiquitous, in-tray, pending-tray and out-tray.

Information is dropped into your in-tray. In many offices there is a cover note which indicates where the information came from, who sent it, what action you are required to make and then a list of other people who are expected to receive the information.

You take a look at it, evaluate it. Then you either deal with it right away, perhaps by just reading it, and marking on the note that you've seen it. You then drop it into your out-tray and it is picked up and filed or passed on to the next person in the chain.

If you can't evaluate something right away it is then put in a pending-tray to be evaluated at a later time.

Many people also keep in and out-trays on their desk at home, but in many cases (including myself) they tend to fill up without things ever moving out the in-try. Over time, pending and out-trays eventually just becoming holders for the overflow when the in-tray has reached capacity.

The reason for this is that there mechanism like the cover or action-note attached to items to keep information flowing and no-one to pickup things from the out-tray and pass them on to others.

We will come back to this point later.

Developing Ideas

An idea often proceeds and triggers the REPL which can be anything from something funny in an email which you want to remember, or a news story about a new product which you think you might be interested in. Any information you find of interest which you want to remember, or know more about, or might be of interest to someone you know is all fodder for the REPL.

Sometimes this will lead to an action, or something that lead to writing a report, or proposal, making a purchase or changing jobs.

The REPL represents a process which employs any number of techniques and approaches. It's worth looking at each step in the loop.

The Read Process (search and collect)

The read process of the loop includes searching, collecting and remembering information that we are looking for or that we come across.

Searching and collecting information is a continuous, ongoing process. Sometimes this is done deliberately done, and other times information may be sent in an email or in dropped in the inbox and kept until it can be evaluated at a later date. It's common to collect information on specific topics over days, weeks, months and even years before there is enough information to be acted on.

Evaluate (edit, sort, organize)

In many respects, the evaluation process is the most important part of the REPL and oddly enough, it's the part that has received the least attention from software developers.

The evaluation process uses what we find and collect to make sense of it and decide on actions to take based on what we come up with, the evaluation process includes a wide variety of techniques which are used in any number of ways by each person depending on their preferences and the job at hand.

This requires a set of tools which can be as simple and general or as complex and fine-grained as is needed. The evaluation process is as much a creative process as much as a formal process and tools should be flexible enough to work with whatever information you are working with, rather than imposing limits on how you can display, edit, sort or publish that information.

Print (share, exchange, publish)

The print process involves editing the results of the evaluation process into a format that can be understood by others and distributing it.

The most informal way to do this is through email. Email allows us to easily exchange information with other people or groups (mailing lists).

In the past few years, blogs have emerged to fill a need for publication which is more formal than an email, but it is far less formal than something that has been published. A Blog is what we come up with after going through the initial evaluation process. It's a means of getting feedback on ideas in progress and whatever other half-baked stuff that is going on in our brains.

For formal publication there are Journals, Newspapers and Books which have traditionally been paper based but are increasingly being replaced with Web-based services.

But formal publication is not just a matter of a single person making something public. Publication is a collaboration which requires intermediate steps including peer-review (or review by some authority), copy editing, and formating which follow conventions that makes it easier for people to understand what is being published.

The print process is a means of travel, both through space and time. The added steps taken for formal publication are important in order for works to become part of mankind's collective knowledge.

Loop

The feedback we get from the print process is then fed back into the beginning of a new loop to be read again. This will then spark new ideas which prompt us to search, collect and remember new things which are passed on to be evaluated again.

This process is used to understand change, to make decisions, and to contribute new information for publication and addition to mankind's collective knowledge and memory.

Integrating Spheres of Information

There is still the problem of exchanging information between people and people, groups and groups and between people and groups.

Each person or group is surrounded by a sphere of information which is processed using the REPL. This information sphere is made up of all of the email, notes, addresses, receipts, images, media, publications and other information which has been collected by the REPL process and makes up the base of information which is used to understand the world around us and to make decisions on how to deal with the world as things change.[ENGELBART]

There is no single way of accomplishing this. The way we organize information and put it in context determines the value and meaning of that information. Everyone uses a different process to collect information for different purposes, and evaluate and organize that information in different ways.

If you send information to another person or group without the context and structure that gives it meaning, the person or group receiving it will spend a large amount of time pulling that information apart and organizing it and putting it into context that they can understand and be used by their own REPL process.

What is missing is a means of making it easier for each person or group to easily integrate information sent to them into their own REPL process without having to strip everything down to bare wood. This has the potential of saving an enormous amount of time and resources in the exchange of information.

Top-down, Bottom-up.

In programing there are two great design methodologies, top-down and bottom-up. Top-down favors the prepared, while bottom up favors the prepared mind.

A top-down approach to writing a novel might be to define the setting for the novel, outline the characters, and then writing an outline for each chapter. When the outline is complete you simply write every chapter according to your outline.

Top-down is favored by large organized projects and is perfect for projects like bridges, rockets and dams which need to have all the kinks worked out beforehand or there could be some nasty consequences.

In terms of what we've been talking about, a top-down approach starts by describing something from a distance and then approaching what you are creating, by creating increasingly more detailed descriptions until you are finished.

A bottom-up approach might start with writing a simple sentence like "Marley was dead: to begin with" without a clue as to who Marley was or how, when or why he was dead. From there you just continue writing and let, to paraphrase Tolkien, "the tale grow in the telling."

Bottom-up is an organic meandering experimental learning, process, full of blind allies, wild epiphanies and a lot of mistakes along the way allowing you to create things that you hadn't intended when you set out.

Bottom-up can start anywhere, from a distance or right smack in the middle. From there you can work your way closer by adding detail, adding new threads, lengthening existing ones and unraveling bits that you don't like as you go along.

In practice, people tend to use a mix of both top-down and bottom-up, a combination of planning peppered with taking advantage of the unexpected encountered along the way.

Collections of information, no matter how large or small must reflect both top-down and bottom-up methodologies. An electronic library should be able to represent works in progress, aborted drafts and anonymous fragments as transparently as it can handle polished published masterpieces.

Multi-pass Markup

The process of creating complex, semantic markup and metadata is hard work which takes time, and a lot of thought. In a world of exponential change, all of these things seem in short supply.

Depending on the task at hand, people won't adopt a system which is too difficult to do simply things or is too simple to do complex things with.

Even if your ultimate goal is to create something rich and complex, if it takes too much effort to start the process, not many people will get very far.

So an important design goal for BMF is to make it as simple as possible to jot down a note which enters the system with little or no thought and then at a later time that note can be added to, linked to other related terms, and eventually develop into as complex and dense a structure as is needed.

This can be accomplished by doing composition and markup in multiple passes without there being any requirement for anything to be more complex than it is in order to become part of the larger collection.

The idea of marking up texts in multiple passes is certainly nothing new, but it hasn't had a lot of attention lavished on it either.

To be clear, we are talking about markup here, not application user interfaces which hides the markup and presents a relatively simple interface to the user. Everything we will discuss in this section should be possible using a good text editor with basic syntax hi-lighting.

No one syntax will accomplish this, so instead we will use three different syntaxes which build one on top of each other. And just as importantly can gracefully degrade as well.

Let's now use an example to start with the most simple encoding to the most complex semantic markup possible.

Our example is a simple entry from the Dictionary of Angels¹¹.

At the bottom of the ladder is structured plain text. We prefer to use UTF-8 for all text, but for this example let's use basic ASCII.

   Omael -- an angel who multiplies species, perpetuates
   races, influences chemists etc.  Omael is (or was) of the
   order of dominations and is among the 72 angels bearing the
   mystical name of God Shemhamphorae.  Whether Omeal is fallen
   or still upright is difficult to determine from the data
   available.  He seems to operate in both domains (Heaven and
   Hell. [Rf. Amberlain, La Kabbale Pratique.]
   

Plain text has a lot going for it. Basic structural formating like paragraphs and sentences, lists etc can be easily indicated and there are a wide variety of tools for processing plain text.

But it is difficult to unequivocally indicate sections, headers, bold or italic text. To do this we can use a Wiki Markup language¹².

   **Omael** -- an angel who multiplies species, perpetuates races,
   influences chemists etc.  *Omael* is (or was) of the order of
   dominations and is among the 72 angels bearing the mystical name
   of God Shemhamphorae.  Whether *Omeal* is fallen or still upright is
   difficult to determine from the data available.  He seems to
   operate in both domains (Heaven and Hell). [Rf. Amberlain, La
   Kabbale Pratique.]
   

The wiki markup is simple and easily converted into HTML or in our case, simple BMF. Block level and inline markup in BMF is based on TEI, so the following markup may look familiar.

   <p><hi>Omael</hi> -- an angel who multiplies species,
   perpetuates races, influences chemists etc. <hi>Omael</hi> is (or
   was) of the order of dominations and is among the 72 angels
   bearing the mystical name of God Shemhamphorae.  Whether
   <hi>Omeal</hi> is fallen or still upright is difficult to
   determine from the data available.  He seems to operate in both
   domains (Heaven and Hell). [Rf. <hi>Amberlain, La Kabbale
   Pratique</hi>.]</p>
   

But now we might want to mark this up more carefully, identifying each name and title and treating this as a formally marked up text in a division entity within an expression entity representing the book.

       <p><pn>Omael</pn> -- an <top>angel</top> who multiplies species,
       perpetuates races, influences chemists etc. <pn>Omael</pn> is (or
       was) of the order of <top>dominations</top> and is among the 72
       angels bearing the mystical name of God <pn>Shemhamphorae</pn>.
       Whether <pn>Omeal</pn> is fallen or still upright is difficult to
       determine from the data available.  He seems to operate in both
       domains (<pl>Heaven</pl> and</pl>Hell</pl>). <ref>[Rf.
       <tit>Amberlain, La Kabbale Pratique</tit>.]</ref></p>
      

Proper names have been marked up with the <pn> element, concepts with the topic <top> element and titles of works with the title <tit> element.

This is as far as most document-based markup languages will go. But BMF can then even go a step further by turning this entry into a proper record for the Angel named Omael.

First we'll use BMF Wiki shorthand to outline the Burr. The following markup is used in Emacs Burs, a BMF browsing and development environment. The Wiki syntax is based on Emacs Muse-Mode wiki syntax and is still in development.

  
                  * hierarchy
   $TT  top  Dictionary of Angels (topicspace)
   $BTI top  beings (mythical & legendary)
   $BTI top  dominions (angelic order)
   $PT  per  Omael (angel; fallen or upright)
  * terms
   $PT  Omael   (angel; fallen or upright)
   $UF  Shemhamphorae (used for the angel, Omael)
  meta:
   ## entityType   : person
   ## PersonalName : Omael
   ## Affiliation  : Heaven; Hell.
   ## Roles        : Angel.
        * scope
          An angel who multiplies species, perpetuates races,
          influences chemists etc.  Omael is (or was) of the order of
          dominations and is among the 72 angels bearing the mystical
          name of God Shemhamphorae.  Whether *Omeal* is fallen or
          still upright is difficult to determine from the data
          available.  He seems to operate in both domains (Heaven and
          Hell).
       * references
          - Dictionary of Angels. pg 212.
          - Amberlain, La Kabbale Pratique
  

We could can then mark this up it using BMF XML syntax. This example is simplified and shortened to make it more readable.

<BURR typ="per">
 <sec typ="hierarchy">
   <i r="TT"  e="top"  l="Dictionary of Angels" q="topicspace" />
   <i r="BTI" e="top"  l="beings"  q="mythical & legandary"
   <i r="BTI" e="top"  l="dominions" q="angelic order" />
   <i r="PT"  e="per"  l="Omael" q="angel; fallen or upright" />
 </sec>
 <sec typ="terms">
   <i r="PT"  l="Omael" q="angel; fallen or upright" />
   <i r="UF"  l="Shemhamphorae"  q="used for the angel, Omael" />
 </sec>
 <sec typ="meta">
   <entityType   l="person" />
   <personalName l=Omael" />
   <affiliation>
     <i l="Heaven;" />
     <i l="Hell." />
   </affiliation>
   <roles>
     <i typ="preferred" l="Angel." q="preferred"/>
   </roles>
 </sec>
 <sec typ="scope">
  <p><pn r="PT">Omael</pn> -- an <top r="BTG">angel</top> who
  multiplies species,
  perpetuates races, influences chemists etc. <pn>Omael</pn> is (or
  was) of the order of <top>dominations</top> and is among the 72
  angels bearing the mystical name of God <pn>Shemhamphorae</pn>.
  Whether <pn>Omeal</pn> is fallen or still upright is difficult to
  determine from the data available.  He seems to operate in both
  domains (<pl r="RT">Heaven</pl> and<pl r="RT">Hell</pl>).</p>
 </sec>
 <sec typ="reference">
  <i id="DOA" r="BTP" l="Dictionary of Angels"
    <a>Dictionary of Angels</i><b>/ Gustav Davison.
    - Toronto, Collier-Macmillan, 1967. - pg. 212.</b>
  </i>
  <i id="AMBERLAIN"  r="BT" l="La Kabbale Pratique">
    <a>La Kabbale Pratique</a><b>/ Robert Amberlain.
    - Paris: Editions Niclaus, 1951.</b>
  </i>
 </sec>
  

Multiple pass markup may not be painless, but it should at least ease the pain as much as possible.

Folksonomies

The problem with getting people to create metadata is that it's usually presented to users as something to do after the fact in the same way that librarians catalog material after it has been published.

If metadata is done in this way, few people will bother. They would rather save what they are working on and and kill time on #emacs or go for a beer. This is because metadata after the fact is something extra which can be put off to a later time. In most cases that time will never come.

This attitude towards metadata as something after the fact has changed dramatically with the introduction of folksonomies by Web services like Flickr, Technorati and Del.icio.us[WIKIPEDIA-FOLK].

A folksonomy is made up of tags. A tag is a keyword which is associated with an image, blog or web page. There is no rhyme or reason to creating tags, and more often than not they are created using nothing more sophisticated than free association.

The problem with tags is that they are flat. All tags are created equal, they are not hierarchical, or grouped or even spelled consistently. This limits what can be done with them.

The "wisdom of crowds" camp claim that collectively, people will create tag sets which are equal to or even superior to formal taxonomies. Others dismiss tags out of hand as being fuzzy and of limited use and will never be a replacement for formal taxonomies.

Both sides are missing the fact that folksonomies and formal taxonomies actually compliment each other and that the two approaches could be combined.

As a general rule, tagging is used for new content. Cataloging using formal taxonomies is done a bit later down the road when the dust has settled and the longer term value of that content has been deemed worth preserving.

Tags can also be useful of as a quick and dirty mnemonic to place something in context, so that we can remember the who what when where or why that information is worth remembering which a formal taxonomy normally wouldn't be able to provide.

Tags can be thought of as rough, first pass cataloging which can later be refined, defined and organized into a catalog record which is organized using a formal taxonomy.

Catalogers should treat tags as a lexicographer treats new words which they are considering for inclusion in a dictionary.

In this view tags aren't discarded in the formal taxonomy, but are incorporated into the process of cataloging and developing taxonomies.

For example, if you look up the tags used for Apple Computer's Web site you might see something like the following:

These tags could later be used to create a record for Apple Computer.

       BT  computers
       PT  . Apple Computers (Computer manufacturer)
       UF  . apple (tag)
       UF  . applecomputers (tag)
       NT  .. Macintosh (computer brand)
       NT  .. OSX (computer operating system).
       NT  .. Liza (computer model)
       NT  .. Powerbook (computer laptop product series)
       NT  .. iPod (electronic music player)
       NT  .. iTunes (electronic music service)
       NT  .. Macintosh OS (computer operating system)
       RT  .. Steve Jobs (Am. co-founder of Apple Computer)
       

The tags which are directly used for Apple computer are included as Used For terms, and the other tags are replaced by preferred terms in the taxonomy, and included as Used For terms in the record for each of these terms.

       
                  PT  
                  Macintosh (computer brand)
       UF  mac (tag)
       UF  macintosh (tag)
       

So tagging becomes the wiki markup of taxonomies, making it easier for people to include metadata as part of the process of creating something, not something done after the fact.

For those creating formal taxonomies and catalogs, tags provide source material for creating records based on consensus.

In addition, even when an item as been formally cataloged, tags may be used a mnemonic to help place content in a personal context.

Burrs

A Burr is the atomic unit in BMF. Each Burr describes a single mutually exclusive concept. A concept can be practically anything from a record describing a person, place, event, book, object or topic.

Burrs can be stuck together into molecular-like structures to create compound records or documents. This sticky nature of Burrs gave them their name.

Burrs come in a number of flavors called Entities. BMF entities are modeled on entities in the FRBR. Entities represent defined classes of types of metadata used to describe different classes of records and have nothing to do with SGML/XML entities.

Topicspaces & BIXDs

Burrs are collected together into collections which share a single id-space which are called topicspaces.

Topicspaces work on the same principle as namespaces in XML by using a unique URL (yes, that's a URL, not a URI) which uniquely and globally identifies a collection of ids which are unique within the topicspace and the location of the collection that it has come from.

All topicspaces used in a Burr are declared in the identity section of the Burr in a similar way that XML declares namespaces.

  <topicspace>
  <i pfx="aut" typ="http://chenla.org/bram/aut" />
  <i pfx="evn" typ="http://localhost/bram/evn" />
  <i pfx="evn" typ="file:///~/bram/evn" />
  </topicspace>
     

In this example, the topicspace called "authority" has the URL http://chenla.org/bram/aut, which is the location where the topicspace can be found.

Topicspace prefixes are combined with an id system called the Burr Exchange ID or BXID. A BXID must begin with three characters from the Roman Alphabet, followed by a single number (0-9), a dash and then a four digit number (0000-9999).

BXIDs are mostly commonly used in the defined-by (d) attribute which is used throughout BMF to indicate Burrs which describe the concept that the element is describing.

   <qt spk="Bill">Babes who've done time are so hot.</qt>
   <qt spk="Ted">Yeah, like <pn d="aut:CIM8-4872">Martha Stewart</pn></qt>
     

Ids used to identify Burrs are made up of a topicspace prefix followed by the BXID:

    aut:EBX5-1244
    dov:JGL0-4847
     

The prefix is expanded to provide the URL, and the BXID itself is expanded to provide the directory structure for the Bramble. So aut:EBX5-1244 would be expanded into:

     http://chenla.org/bram/aut/E/B/X/5/1/2/4/4/
     

The file name of the Burr is the BXID with a file extension of .wik or .xml. Processing applications should check first for an XML file, and if it doesn't exist look for a Wiki version before signaling an error or prompting the user if they want to create a new Burr with this id.

A topicspace can be used to collect any numbers of Burrs for any purpose. They can be used as an archive of email, a collection of day pages holding task lists, schedules and notes. They can be used for holding records of persons, an encyclopedia, a book, a dictionary, an inventory of medical images.... etc.

Brambles

Local copies of complete or incomplete topicspaces are kept in a Bramble.

BMF uses a distributed content model which is modeled on version control systems like CVS [Concurrent Version Control System] and Subversion, but in particular Arch¹³.

While CVS and Subversion is based on the existence of a single repository. Users check-out a copy of the repository to work with locally and then check-in changes when they are finished if they have write access to the repository.

A copy can then become a branch of the main repository, and continue on as a separate project.

Arch has no centralized repository so everything is a branch which you have local write access to. If you want to submit a change to the maintainer you send it to her and she merges that change into her copy which acts as the central repository. Functionally, every repository is a central repository in Arch.

This is a good way of understanding Brambles.

When you browse a Bramble on your own local machine, you are looking at a file which is local. If you follow a link which points to a Burr you don't have a local copy of, the application you are using should grabs grab a copy of the Burr you want to see, as well as all immediate Burrs that the Burr links to and store local copies in your Bramble.

This approach might seem strange from a World Wide Web perspective, but BMF is a read-write framework, allowing anyone to annotate, edit and add content to their own personal collection of data.

Access restrictions can be placed on individual Burrs and even whole Topicspaces and Brambles so that publicly available material is not mixed up with private material and ensure that only the owner of a Burr is able to change or overwrite their own content.

Links in BMF

Links in BMF come in three flavors,

Relationships

Most links in BMF specify the type of relationship that the link represents. These include equivalence, hierarchical, associative, responsibility, and sequential types of relationships between the concepts represented by the Burrs at each end of the link.

A large part of BMF is concerned with establishing relationship-links between the concept described by a Burr with related concepts described by other Burrs.

Sections

Burrs are divided into sections using the <sec> element. Sections come in a number of different types. A single section type can only be used once in a Burr.

For example, a simple Burr might include the following sections:

     Burr
     . Hierarchy Section
     . Terms Section
     . Meta Section
     . Scope Section
     . Reference Section
     . Identity Section
     . History Section
     

Sections can be roughly grouped into a couple of categories. These include the hierarchy sections and sections which extend it, the metadata sections which provide named fields for metadata, notes sections for different kind of descriptive material, and finally sections for describing the Burr itself (version numbers, creation dates etc).

Entities

Burrs are divided into some forty different flavors called Entities. BMF entities (which should not be confused with XML and SGML entities) are based on the FRBR entity-relationship model.

BMF entities are clustered into entity groups which define relationships between in each group.

There are entities for persons, temporal concepts, physical objects, places, intellectual and creative works, symbols and words, concepts and technical documentation.

XML serialization

Burrs are serialized using XML syntax which can easily be parsed into SXML for use in Lisp data structures.

XML Declaration

Like all XML documents, a Burr begins with a XML declaration which must be the first thing in a file. No whitespace is allowed before the declaration.

   <?xml version="1.0"  encoding="utf-8"?>
   

The Document Element for locating the schema

Optionally, Burrs may contain a documentElement containing the a uri attribute to locate the schema.

   <documentElement prefix="xml" uri="bmf-1.rnc"/>
   

The Structure of a Typical Burr

The Root element for all Burrs is the <BURR> element. The <BURR> element is required to contain a typ (type) attribute which identifies the Burr's entity type.

A Burr is made up of <sec> (section) elements. There is no limit to the number of sections which can be included but sections can not be nested and only a sigle instance of each type of section is allowed.

The <sec> element requires a typ (type) attribute which identifies the type of section.

The overall structure of a typical Burr might look like this:

     <BURR typ="entity-type">
     <sec typ="hierarchy"> [ hierarchy list ...    ] </sec>
     <sec typ="terms">     [ terms list ...        ] </sec>
     <sec typ="meta">      [ meta fields ...       ] </sec>
     <sec typ="scope">     [ scope note ...        ] </sec>

        [ other sections ... ]

     <sec typ="reference"> [ cited sources list... ] </sec>
     <sec typ="identity">  [ burr metadata info... ] </sec>
     <sec typ="history">   [ change log entries ...] </sec>
     </BURR>
   

This structure helps ensure that each Burr describes a single mutually exclusive concept. Keeping the structure relatively flat and simple makes it easier to keep each Burr focused on a single concept.

Compound Burrs can be created through the use of sections like the TOC (table of contents) section type which uses the source src attribute, to pull together any number of Burrs into complex molecular-like structures.

BMF Schema

The BMF schema uses the compact form of RELAX NG. The recommended tool for editing XML serialized Burrs is nxml-mode in Emacs which validates documents using a Compact RELAX NG.

The schema is heavily commented and designed to provide interim documentation until the BMF reference manual is ready for initial release.

Kinds of Relationships

BMF uses five kinds of relationships. The first three are drawn from ANSI Z39.19. [Z39.19]

• the equivalence relationship
• the hierarchical relationship
• the associative relationship
• the responsibility relationship
• the sequential relationship

Every relationship has the property of reciprocity, i.e. every relationship between term A and term B has a corresponding relationship from term B to term A.

the equivalence relationship

When two or more terms are used to describe the same concept, one term is selected as the preferred term, i.e., the descriptor. The equivalence relationship describes the relationship between preferred and non-preferred terms which describe the same concept.

The Preferred term should be indicated using the code PT (Preferred Term). Non-preferred terms should be indicated using the code UF (Used For). In an index, non-preferred terms point to the preferred term using the USE code.

   
                  PT 
                  Charles Dickens
   UF Boz (pseudonym for Charles Dickens).
   

   Boz USE Charles Dickens
       

   
                  PT 
                  Squid
   UF Calamari
   

   Calamari USE Squid
   

UF+ (USED FOR . . . AND . . .) is used for non-preferred compound terms The + (plus) sign indicated that this is a compound term which is accompanied by an AND.

   
                  PT  
                  coal
   UF+ coal
   AND mining
   

For compound terms which are made from two mutually exclusive terms to form a single concept, USE+.... AND is used to indicate that both terms must be used together in an index.

   coal mining USE+ coal AND mining
   

   ferromagnetic films USE+ ferromagnetic materials AND films
   

the hierarchical relationship

The hierarchical relationship is what separates the men from the boys in BMF. It is the hierarchical relationship which turns the relationships and links in a Burr into a local tree.

The relationship is very basic and indicates if a term is broader (superordinate) or narrower (subordinate). The codes used to indicate this are BT (Broader Term) and NT (Narrower Term).

   BT  Beings (real or imaginary creature)
   PT  . Fairies (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Brownies (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Leprechauns (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Goblins (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Gnomes (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Elves (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Kobolds (magical creatures)
   NT  .. Pixies (magical creatures)
   

instantive hierarchical relationships

This last example is okay, but Brownies, Goblins and Pixies are not simply narrower terms, they are instances of different types of Fairies.

The instantive relationship uses the codes BTI (Broader Term Instance) and NTI (Narrower Term Instance).

   BT   Beings (real or imaginary creature)
   PT   . Fairies (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Brownies (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Leprechauns (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Goblins (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Gnomes (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Elves (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Kobolds (magical creatures)
   NTI  .. Pixies (magical creatures)
   

The generic relationship

The generic relationship indicates the relationship between a class of concepts and its members or species. The codes used are NTG (Narrower Term Generic) and BTG (Broader Term Generic).

   BTG  rodents
   PT    . mice
   
               

   
                  PT   
                  rodents
   NTG   . rats
   NTG   . mice
   NTG   . squirrels
   NTG   . porcupines
   NTG   . skunks
   

Whole part hierarchical relationships

The whole-part relationship is used to indicate that a term is part of a larger whole. The codes used are NTP (Narrower Term Partitive) and BTP (Broader Term Partitive).

   
                  PT   
                  Crazy Horse (Musical Group)
   NTP  . Niel Young
   NTP  . Frank "Poncho" Sampedro
   NTP  . Billy Talbot
   NTP  . Ralph Molina
   

Polyhierarchical relationships

In some instances, a concept may belong to more than one category. When this cannot be avoided, the relationship can be indicated using multiple Broader terms.

   BT  Peanut Butter (candies & sweets)
   BT  Chocolate (candies & sweets)
   PT  . Reces's Peanut Butter Cups
   
               

   BTG  bones
   BTP  head
   PT    . skull
   
               

Associative relationships

When a relationship is neither equivalent or hierarchical but is associated with the concept the Burr is describing, the link should be made using the associative relationship which uses the code RT (Related Term).

   BT Roman Catholic Church
   PT  . Popes (officially recognized)
   RT  .. Anti Popes (persons who claimed the title)
   

   BT  pinup models
   PT  . Pamela Anderson
   RT  .. Bay Watch (Am. television series)
   

Responsibility relationships

The responsibility relationship is used to indicate when the concept represented by a term is responsible in whole or part for it's existence (such as a creative work) or taking place (such as an event). The codes used are BTR (Broader Term Responibility) and NTR (Narrower Term Responsibility).

   BTR  per  Charles Dickens (person)
   PT   wrk   . A Christmas Carol (work)
   

   BTR  cor  3M Corporation
   PT   evn   . Bhopal Chemical Spill
   
               

It should be noted that responsibility relationships are not a standard thesauri relationship type.

Sequential relationships

Another departure that BMF makes with standard thesaurus relationships is the addition of sequential relationships.

These are used in div (Division Entities) to indicate nodes which come before or after. In a full table of contents for a document all sections of the document are NTP (Narrower Term Partitive) terms of the document. But when you are looking at a single node, it is helpful to indicate which nodes precede the present node and which ones follow.

The codes used are PRE (Previous Node) and NEX (Next Node).

   BT  A Christmas Carol (expression)
   PRE Stave One (chapter)
   PT   . Stave Two (chapter)
   NEX  .. Stave Three (chapter)
   

Node Labels

Node labels are used in hierarchical displays to help show principle divisions which are helpful for the display but not intended to be used as index terms. The code used is NL (Node Label).

   
                  PT  
                  Charles Dickens (Eng. novelist, 1812-1870)
   NL  
                  major works
   NT   . The Pickwick Papers (1836)
   NT   . Oliver Twist (1837–1839)
   NT   . Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839)
   NT   . The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841)
   NT   . Barnaby Rudge (1841)
   NT   . Martin Chuzzlewit (1843NT .1844)
   NT   . Dombey and Son (1846–1848
   NT   . David Copperfield (1849–1850)
   NT   . Bleak House (1852–1853)
   NT   . Hard Times (1854)
   NT   . Little Dorrit (1855–1857)
   NT   . A Tale of Two Cities (July 11, 1859)
   NT   . Great Expectations (1860–1861)
   NT   . Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)
   NT   . The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished) (1870)
   NL  
                  Christmas books
   NT  . A Christmas Carol
   NT  . The Chimes
   NT  . The Cricket on the Hearth
   NT  . The Battle of Life
   NT  . The Haunted Man
   

Top terms

The top term in BMF uses the relationship code TT (Top Term) are treated somewhat differently from standard thesauri.

Top Terms in BMF are reserved for Topicspaces and Brambles. A Bramble is always a local Bramble, made up of what is on your computer, or the computer you are connecting to on the Internet.

So a Bramble is it's own top or root term or descriptor.

   TT   Bramble
   NTP  . topicspace 1
   NTP  . topicspace 2
   NTP  . topicspace 3
   

Topicspaces are the top term in their own hierarchy, so any Burr in a topicspace will point to the topicspace it belongs to as its top term.

   TT  Topicspace 1
   PT   . Burr 2
   
               

If you then go to the Burr which defines the topicspace you will see the local Bramble it belongs to.

   TT   Bramble
   PT   . Topicspace 1
   NTP  .. Burr 1
   NTP  .. Burr 2
   

This is very practical, because it allows you to download and keep a local copy of a Burr without having to remap the top term of your copy of the Burr.

Entity Groups

BMF attempts, whenever possible to expand on the FRBR model rather than change it. By expanding on FRBR instead of altering the model, it is relatively easy for BMF Burrs to map to any catalog system which adopts the FRBR model. [FRBR]

This should not be difficult since the places where BMF expand on FRBR are confined to parts of the model which are beyond the scope of traditional cataloging systems (ie. FRBR Entity Groups 2 and 3). Another advantage of this approach is that BMF can use the wealth of tools and experience that has been invested in National Bibliographic Records from around the world.

BMF has adopted the FRBR Group 1 almost verbatim, but expands FRBR Groups 2 and 3 into eight groups, for a total of nine entity groups and some forty entity-types (some of which are provisional).

Introduction

The entities in the first group can be thought of as a hierarchical representation of the different aspects of intellectual or artistic creations. This group is modeled on FRBR Group 1 Entities.

BMF uses FRBR's four different types of Group 1 entities to describe the different aspects of creative works.

Entities

Relationships

A work may share the same parent-work or story with one or more than one work, and may be realized through one or more than one expression.

   
                  PT   
                  work
   NTI   . expression
   

An expression, is the realization of one and only one work, but may be embodied in one or more than one manifestation.

   BTI  work
   PT    . expression
   NTI   . manifestation
   

A manifestation may embody one or more than one expression, but may be exemplified by one or more than one item.

   BTI expression
   PT   . manifestation
   NTI  .. item
   

An item may exemplify one and only one manifestation.

   BTI manifestation
   PT  . item
   
               

BMF Bibliographic and FRBR Group 1

Now that we have introduced BMF bibliographic entities we will compare the FRBR Group 1 with BMF Entity Groups in some detail as this concerns a number of important problems that were faced in developing BMF.

     A Christmas Carol / Charles Dickens.
     

     A Christmas Carol : original text and illustrations.
     / Charles Dickens; with illustrations by John Leech.
     

     BTI  work  Olson's The special view of history
     PT   expr   . original text
     NTP  div    .. First page
     NTP  div    .. Quotations
     NTP  div    .. History, a definition.
     [ ... rest of the chapters]
     

     BTI  work  Ann Charter's Introduction to The special view of
                history.
     PT   expr   . original text
     NTP  div    .. body of text.
     

     BTI  work  Olson's The special view of history
     BTI  work  Ann Charter's Introduction to The special view of
                      history.
           PT   expr   . The special view of history: original text
                         with an introduction by Ann Charter.
           NTP  expr   .. original text of the introduction by Ann Charters
           NTP  expr   .. original text of of The special view of history.
     

     BTI   expr   The special view of history: original text
                  with an introduction by Ann Charter.
           PT    man    . The special view of history / Charles Olson
                          with an introduction by Ann Charters.
                          - Berkeley, Oyez, 1970.
                          ISBN 0-520-04015-5.
           NTI   item   .. copy on my desk.
           NTI   item   .. Black Mountain College Library.
                           catalog number : PS3555.L850
     

Introduction

Entities in the Agent group fall into two broad categories, people and corporate bodies.

Entities

Relationships

A person may be a member of one or more corporate body or family.

   BTP  corporate body
   BTP  family
   PT    . person
   
               

A family has two or more persons as narrower parts and if a family owns a business, a corporate body may be a narrower term.

   
                  PT  
                  family
   NTP  . person
   NTP  . person
   NTP  . corporate body
   

A corporate body may be a member of one or more other corporate bodies and one or more persons may be members of that corporate body.

   BT corporate body
   PT  . corporate body
   NT  .. corporate body
   NT  .. person
   

Introduction

Entities in the Semantic & Lexical Group are concerned with concepts (topics, subjects and ideas) and how they are labeled, identified and used. The entities in this group form the foundation for both category or subject trees but also for dictionaries and glosses.

Entities

Relationships

A symbol is always a narrower instance of a concept.

   
                  PT  
                  concept
   NTI  . symbol
       

A system is made up of symbols which are narrower parts of a system, and based on a concept which is a broader instance of that system.

   BTI concept
   PT   . system
   NTP  .. symbol
   

A symbol does not have to be a narrower term of a system, but usually is so the both of the following are correct:

   BTI concept
   PT  . symbol
   
               

   BTI concept
   BTP system
   PT   . symbol
   
               

Introduction

Each of us lives in the present which is made up of the instance in which change occurs and the scope of that change in physical space. Modern man conceives of time as being a thread made up of events which is left behind as the present relentlessly extends it.

We think of the past as a snapshot of the world in a previous present but in fact the past is more of a portrait made up of artifacts and recollection from previous presents. The past does not exist, except as a mental image we have in the present which is changing from moment to moment as change occurs in the present.

The model used by the Temporal Entity Group takes this into account by establishing a single division of time which is used as a baseline overlayed by other calendar systems.

Specific instances in time are defined as relative to this baseline using the date entity which represents a specific duration of time.

The event entity describes an instance of a date in which something changes over the duration of that instance within specific spacial boundaries relative to an observer.

The other temporal entities in the group, periods and threads are different ways of describing specific changes and causative chains.

This allows any number of events to be attached to the same date. These different events may be concurrent local events which are separated geographically, but they also may be different descriptions of the same event from different perspectives within different contexts.

So the Crash of the Hindenburg, might have many different event entities which are narrower parts or instances of the crash. The news reel footage of the crash together with the reporters famous commentary is the event described from the perspective of an outside observer who was present during the event. Another event could be used to describe what happened from the perspective of a passenger who survived the crash. Still another event could be used to hypothesize the perspective of other passengers who did not survive, or an artificial perspective which pulls many different perspectives together.

A more mundane example would be a wedding, where different observers such as the father of the bride, the bride, a guest at the wedding and the caterer would all provide different perspectives of the same wedding within overlapping but not identical spacial boundaries.

In this way, there is no such thing as a single objective global description of an event, period or thread. Everything is the subjective description from the perspective of an observer anchored to a single shared baseline division of time.

Entities

Relationships

Periods, threads and events will always be narrower instances of a date.

   
                  PT   
                  Date
   NTI   . Period
   NTI   . Thread
   NTI   . Event
   

Threads and events will always be narrower parts of periods and instances of broader dates.

   BTI  Date
   PT   . Period
   NTP   .. Thread
   NTP   .. Event
   

Events will always be an instance of a broader date and may be broader parts of Periods or Threads.

   BTI  Date
   BTP  Period
   BTP  Thread
   PT    . Event
   
               

Introduction

BMF approaches man made objects in a similar way that bibliographic entities are described. In the object model, object entities are roughly equivalent to object entities, design entities are equivalent to expressions, models to manifestations and items to items.

In you understand the bibliographic group model then the physical entity group shouldn't be difficult.

   
                  object   
                  electric guitars
   design    . Gibson Stratocaster
   model     .. Hendrix Stratocaster
   item      .. Frank Zappa's Hendrix Strat.
   

The material entity has been added in order to describe materials which can be natural or man made.

   material   air
   material   water
   material   snow
   

Materials may be agricultural products like rice, or soybeans.

   
                  object    
                  rice (grain)
   material   . Jasmine rice
   

The entity can be used alone, as a concept representing a natural material

   
                  object    
                  ink
   material   . Indian ink
   model      .. Acme India Ink no.433
   

Entities

Relationships

An object will always have designs as a narrower instance.

   
                  PT   
                  object
   NTI   . design
   

A design must have an object as a broader instance and a model as a narrower instance.

   BTI object
   PT   . design
   NTI  .. model
   

A model must have a design as a broader instance and items as narrower instance.

   BTI  design
   PT    . model
   NTI   .. item
   

Materials do not have objects as broader terms, but may have items, which include quantities as narrower terms.

   BTG  object
   PT    . material
   NT    .. item
   

Introduction

There are several excellent thesauri for place names including the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names and Project Alexandria which can be used for free online.

The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names used the following hierarchy for the city of Troy.

   World (top term)
   . Asia (continent)
   .. Turkey (nation)
   ... Marmara (region)
   .... Çanakkale (province)
   ..... Troy (deserted settlement)
   

This is a proper hierarchy for Troy (Hisarlik) today, as a deserted settlement in Turkey. But if you are looking up Troy in context of the Iliad, the hierarchy might be as follows:

   World (top term)
   . Asia (continent)
   .. Asia Minor (region)
   ... Troad (legendary province)
   .... Troy (legendary inhabited settlement)
   

It makes sense to break places down into a concept representing the place and then define specific manifestations of that place during different periods in history.

So both the legendary Troy as well as the ruins that are thought to be Troy today might be represented as follows:

   BTP  wld   World
   BTP  loc   . Asia
   PT   loc   .. Troy (legendary, historical and deserted settlement)
   NTI  plc   ... Troy (Hellenic Troy; legendary settlement)
   NTI  plc   ... Troy (Turkey; deserted settlement)
   

This is overly simplified — there are over 9 Troys starting in the Bronze Age and lasting till the end of the Roman Empire.

There are some very real advantages to this approach. References made to places in a work like William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" would point to locations which today are part of the United States of America.

By defining Plymouth as a locus with places including Plymouth (Pilgrim settlement), Plymouth (colony town) and then Plymouth (settlement in Massachusetts) references made by different people during different periods, could be understood in context with places, events people and content contemporary to that period.

At first glance the world entity might appear to be an odd choice. But it has proved to be invaluable for differentiating fictional worlds from the real world allowing us to describe whole fictional universes as systems.

   BTP   wrld  middle earth (fictional past earth)
   PT    loc    . Shire (fictional region)
   

Any stellar body can be described with the world entity.

   BTP  wrld  milky way (galaxy)
   PT   wrld   . sol (star)
   NTP  wrld   .. mercury (planet)
   NTP  wrld   .. venus (planet)
   NTP  wrld   .. earth (planet)
   NTP  wrld   .. mars (planet)
   

   
                  PT   wrld  earth (planet)
   NTP  wrld   . luna (moon)
   

   
                  PT   cor   Federation of Planets (fictional government)
   NTP  wrld   . Earth  (fictional future earth)
   NTP  wrld   . Vulcan (fictional planet)
   

Entities

Relationships

A locus or feature will always be narrower parts of a world.

   
                  PT   
                  world
   NTP   . locus
   

A locus will always be a broader part of a world, and a place and or feature as a narrower instance.

   NTP  world
   PT    . locus
   NTI   .. place
   NTI   .. feature
   

Introduction

The content group is different from other entity groups we have discussed so far in that there is no hierarchical relationships between the different kinds of entities within the group.

The div (division) entity is very general, and could have been used for other kinds of content entities, but scholia, messages and day (day pages) will be used in such large numbers and be treated differently from other types of division entities that that have been given their own types.

The scholia and glossa entities are somewhat unique in BMF because they are the only entity types to be linked directly to inline elements within other Burrs rather than using the relationship and defined-by attributes used universally throughout BMF.

Entities

Relationships

The division entity (div) is a container for holding master markup of texts and collections of media. At the moment the only place that it is expected to be used is as a narrower part of an expression entity.

     
                  PT   
                  expression
     NTP   . div
     NTP   . div
     NTP   . div
     

A scholia is an independent entity which may be part of an expression as a div is used, but it may also be used for commentary on other commentary.

     
                  PT   
                  expression
     NTP   . scholia
     NTP   . scholia
     

     BTP  expression
     PT    . scholia
     NTP   .. scholia
     

     BTP  expression
     PT    . glossa
     
               

A message or day page is typically associated with a concept which is used to define a group of emails, and or with a date. Scholia may be attached to messages as well.

     BTP  concept (group name)
     BT   date
     PT    . message
     NTP   .. scholia
     

     BTP  concept (group name)
     BT   date
     PT    . day
     NTP   . scholia
     

Introduction

The entities in the Documentation group may be used to create documentation for any markup language, programing language, technical specification, reference manual or tutorial.

The doc (documentation) entity is similar to an expression entity. The body of text for each section or chapter uses division entities, and then reference entities are used to define elements, attributes, functions, enumerated values etc.

Documentation can then be converted into different formats for distribution (info, man, html, TeX, postscript etc) and be described using manifestation entities.

Entities

Relationships

A doc entity is a broader instance of a work, and then may have any number of narrower parts made up of div, element, attribute, enumerated, entity, section, function, class, variable and module entities.

   BTI   work
   PT     . doc
   NTP    .. div
   NTP    .. reference
   

Introduction

The Burr not only is the atomic unit in BMF, it is also used to describe larger structures.

In the early days of BMF development, it was assumed that special structures would be developed for pulling Burrs into larger structures, but when Emacs Burs was first written, Burrs were used to represent topicspaces and brambles.

It became obvious that the Burr structure was perfect for defining Brambles which are little more than lists of topicspaces and for topicspaces which are little more than lists of Burrs.

Entities

Relationships

A bramble is always the top term. Topicspaces are narrower parts of a bramble.

   
                  TT   
                  bramble
   NTP  . topicspace
   NTP  . topicspace
   

   
                  TT  
                  bramble
   PT   . topicspace
   

Hierarchy section group

At base, the hierarchy is a simple list of terms which are related to the concept the Burr is describing.

Some Burrs might have literally hundreds of terms, so in order to keep things manageable, the hierarchy section is broken into a number of different sections, but conceptually, they are treated as extensions of the hierarchy section.

The only element allowed in the any sections in the hierarchy section group is the item <i> element.

Items come in two different flavors, simple and bibliographic. This simple format looks like this:

    <i r="BT" e="t" d="top:HGW6-7648" l="person"
       q="human being; living or dead" />
   

All items should include the following attributes:

The bibliography and reference sections use a more complex approach which provides enough information to identify and understand the reference and then point to a Burr which defines it.

A bibliographic reference must serve two purposes, a) information which places the reference within the larger hierarchy of the Burr, and optionally, a more detailed bibliographic entry which:

• allow the title to be separate from the rest of the entry so that processing applications can easily turn the title into a hyperlink.
• include a separate URL link for online resources like Web pages.
• include a separate notes section for additional information and comments related to the information.

So an item will have the following structure:

  <i r="relationship" e="entity-type" er="ext relationship"
     d="defined-by"  l="label" q="qualifier">
   <a>title proper</a> <b> [General material Designation] / responsibility.
    - city : publisher, date. </lb>
    URL: </b> <ref src="http://www.example.org">www.example.org</ref>
   <m>descriptive note</m>
  </i>
   

The tags, <a> title proper, <b> rest of title and other information, and <m> descriptive note, are based on MARC tags.

Formating and punctuation should follow something along the lines of ISBD(G) rules. There are a number of subtle differences between ISBD and BMF as well as all sorts of record types which aren't covered by isbd at all, so BMF will have it's own full blown format guidelines which are documented as fully as ISBD.

For example, the GMD (General Material Designation) which is used to describe media types in ISBD is used to describe the form of the work or expression described.

Sections

    <sec typ="hierarchy">
      <i r="TT"  e="t" d="aut:AAA0-0000" l="Authority"
         q="Librarium topicspace" />
      <i r="BT" e="t" d="top:HGW6-7648" l="person"
         q="human being; living or dead" />
      <i r="PT" e="p" d="aut:UJA7-6676" l="Dickens, Charles John Huffman"
         q="Eng. novelist, 1812-1870" />
    </sec>
     

    <sec typ="terms">
      <i r="PT" l="Charles Dickens" q="Eng. novelist, 1812-1870" />
      <i r="UF" l="Charles John Huffam Dickens"
         q="full name for Charles Dickens"/>
      <i r="UF" l="Boz" q="psued. of Charles Dickens" />
      <i r="UF" l="Karol Dickens" q="used for Charles Dickens" />
      <i r="UF" l="C`arlz Dikensi" q="used for Charles Dickens" />
      <i r="UF" l="Charl'z Dikkens" q="used for Charles Dickens" />
      <i r="UF" l="Charlz Dikens" q="used for Charles Dickens" />
      <i r="UF" l="Charlz Dikkens" q="used for Charles Dickens" />
    </sec>
     

    <sec typ="related">
      <i r="NT" er="parent" l="John Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1785-1851" />
      <i r="NT" er="parent" l="Elizabeth Barrow"
         q="Scot. 1789-1863" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Frances Elizabeth Fanny Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1810-48" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Alfred Dickens"
         q="Eng. b. &amp; d. 1814" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Letitia Mary Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1816-74" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Harriet Ellen Dickens"
         q="Eng. b. &amp; d. 1819" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Frederick William Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1820-68" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Alfred Lamert Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1822-60" />
      <i r="NT" er="sibling" l="Augustus Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1827-68" />
      <i r="NT" er="spouse" l="Catherine Thompson Hogarth"
         q="Scot. 1815-79 married 1836" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Charles Culliford Boz Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1837-96" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Mary Angela Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1838-1896" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Kate Macready Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1839-1929" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Walter Landor Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1841-63" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Francis Jeffrey Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1844-86" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Alfred Tennyson Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1845-1912" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1847-72" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Henry Fielding Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1849-1933" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Dora Annie Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1850-51" />
      <i r="NT" er="child" l="Edward Bulwer Lytoon Dickens"
         q="Eng. 1852-1902" />
      <i r="NT" er="lover" l="Maria Beadnell (1810-86" />
      <i r="NT" er="lover" l="Ellen Lawless Ternan"
         q="Eng. actress; 1839-1914" />
      <i r="NT" er="grandchild" d="aut:INX7-1885" l="Monica Dickens"
         q="Eng. novelist 1915-1992" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Grip"
         q="first pet raven" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Grip"
         q="second pet raven" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Sultan"
         q="pet dog; St.Bernard-bloodhound" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Timber"
         q="pet dog; white spaniel" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Turk"
         q="pet dog; mastiff" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Linda"
         q="pet dog; St.Bernard" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Don"
         q="pet dog; Newfoundland" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Bumble"
         q="pet dog; Newfoundland" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Mrs.Bouncer"
         q="pet dog; white Pomeranian 1859-74" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Williamina"
         q="pet cat" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Dick"
         q="pet canary" />
      <i r="NT" er="pet" l="Newman Noggs"
         q="pet pony" />
    </sec>
           

 <sec typ="bibliography">
  <div>
   <hd>Christmas books</hd>

   <p>In the brief preface to the collected <w>Christmas Books</w>,
   describes them as <qt>a whimsical kind of masque intended to awaken
   loving and forbearing thoughts.</qt></p>

   <p>The first of the series, <w>A Christmas Carol</w> was quickly
   written late in 1843 as a means of raising some quick money.  This
   is not to say that this was the only motivation.  <cit><qt>[T]he
   idea of Christmas as a season of good feeding and good feeling was
   congenial to all Dickens's best characteristics, though it may have
   slightly encouraged some of his weaknesses.</qt> <ref
   ptr="CHEAL">CHEAL</ref></cit>.</p>

   <p>The enormous popularity of <sc>The Carol</sc>, as it became known
   fueled calls for a sequel the following Christmas.  Dicken's obliged
   with <w>The Chimes</w> (1843) and the series continued with <w>The
   Cricket on the Hearth</w> (1845) and finally <w>The Haunted Man</w>
   (1848). Taken together these have become known as <sc>The Christmas
   Books</sc>.</p>

   <li>
    <i r="NT" e="e" er="author" d="bib:IUT4-2844" l="A Christmas Carol" q="1843">
     <a>A Christmas Carol</a> <b>[novella] with illustrations by John
     Leech. - London : Chapman & Hall, 1843.</b>
    </i>
    <i r="NT" e="e" er="author" d="bib:QGY1-3372" l="The Chimes" q="1844">
     <a>The Chimes</a> <b>; A Goblin Story, [novella] with
     illustrations by John Leech; Daniel Maclise; Richard Doyle;
     Clarkson Stanfield. - London : Chapman & Hall, 1844.</b>
    </i>
    <i r="NT" e="e" er="author" d="bib:COD4-0230" l="The Cricket on the Hearth
       q="novella, 1845" />
    <i r="NT" e="e" er="author" d="bib:NGC1-4171" l="The Battle of Life"
       q="novella, 1846" />
    <i r="NT" e="e" er="author" d="bib:MBP0-5042" l="The Haunted Man"
       q="novella, 1848" />
   </li>
  <div>
 </sec>

   

 <sec typ="toc">
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:XPX7-8381" l="Title Page" />
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:KLU8-0011" l="Incipit" />
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:KXC5-8788" l="Prayer" />
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:BGD4-0725" l="Preface" />
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:PLX1-3532" l="Contents" />
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:GGS1-0271" l="Chapter One" />
   <i r="NTP" e="div" d="bib:IWI0-1454" l="Chapter Two" />
 </sec>
   

Metadata Section Group

At present, there is only a single section (meta) in this group. But it is expected that, like the hierarchy group, the meta section could be extended in a similar manner.

For example, the fields in a person Burr are presently designed to document public figures (both historical and living). But a person Burr for a business contact would include contact information, as well as purchase and billing information which might be more useful in a separate section.

A person Burr for yourself might include everything from medical information, personal information, educational, financial and family information. Some of this information you might want to selectively share with others and some would be strictly private. Breaking important metadata into different sections would make this easier.

    <sec typ="meta">
      <entityType l="person" />
      <personalName sur="Dickens" giv="Charles" add="John Huffman"
                    l="Dickens, Charles John Huffman"/>
      <dates>
       <i typ="birth" dt="1812-02-07"
          l="Born at Landport, near Portsmouth, England, 7 Feb., 1812;" />
       <i typ="death" dt="1870-06-09"
          l="died at Gadshill, near Rochester, England, 9 June, 1870;" />
       <i typ="burial" dt="1870-06-14"
          l="buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, 14 June, 1870." />
      </dates>
      <roles>
       <i typ="preferred" l="novelist;" q="preferred" />
       <i l="journalist;" />
       <i l="editor." />
      </roles>
      <affiliation>
       <i typ="preferred" l="England" q="national, preferred" />
      </affiliation>
      <locus>
       <i l="England;" />
       <i l="Chatham;"/>
       <i d="geo:PDF8-7270" l="Portsmouth." />
      </locus>
      <gender typ="m" l="male" />
    </sec>
        

Notes Section Group

Notes sections revolve around the idea of breaking records down into parts which allow you to start with the general and move in to progressively more detailed information. This is the embodiment of LOD (Level of Detail) which was discussed earlier.

    <sec typ="scope">
     <p>In full <pn>Charles John Huffam Dickens</pn> English
     novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian
     era.  His many volumes include such works as <w>A Christmas
     Carol</w>, <w>David Copperfield</w>, <w>Bleak House</w>, <w>A
     Tale of Two Cities</w>, <w>Great Expectations</w>, and <w>Our
     Mutual Friend</w>.</p>
    </sec>
   

    <sec typ="intro">
      <hd>Charles Dickens Eng. novelist, 1812-1870</hd>

      <p>In full <pn>Charles John Huffam Dickens</pn> English
      <rl>novelist</rl>, generally considered the greatest of the
      Victorian era.</p>

      <p>He was the son of <pn>John Dickens</pn>, who served as a
      clerk in the navy pay-office and afterward became a newspaper
      reporter. Dickens' received an elementary education in private
      schools, served for a time as an attorney's clerk , and in
      1835 became reporter for the <ser>London Morning
      Chronicle</ser>. In 1833 he published in the <ser>Monthly
      Magazine</ser> his first story, entitled <w>A Dinner at Poplar
      Walk</w>, which proved to be the beginning of a series of
      papers printed collectively as <w>Sketches by Boz</w> in
      1836. He married <pn>Catherine</pn>, daughter of <pn>George
      Hogarth</pn>, in 1836. In 1836-37 he published the <w>Pickwick
      Papers</w>, by which his literary reputation was
      established. He became editor of <ser>Household Words</ser> in
      1849, and of <ser>All the Year Round</ser> in 1859, and
      visited America in 1842 and 1867-68.</p>

      <p>His chief works include <w>Pickwick Papers</w> (1837),
      <w>Oliver Twist</w> (1838), <w>Nicholas Nickleby</w>
      (1838-39), <w>Master Humphrey's Clock</w>, including <w>Old
      Curiosity Shop</w> and <w>Barnaby Rudge</w> (1840-41),
      <w>American Notes</w> (1842), <w>Christmas Carol</w> (1843),
      <w>Martin Chuzzlewit</w> (1843-44), <w>Chimes</w> (1844),
      <w>Cricket on the Hearth</w> (1845), <w>Dombey and Son</w>
      (1846-48), <w>David Copperfield</w> (1849-50), <w>Bleak
      House</w> (1852-53), <w>Hard Times</w> (1854), <w>Little
      Dorrit</w> (1855-57), <w>Tale of Two Cities</w> (1859),
      <w>Uncommercial Traveler</w> (1860), <w>Great Expectations</w>
      (1860-61), <w>Our Mutual Friend</w> (1864-65), <w>Mystery of
      Edwin Drood</w> (unfinished).</p>
     </sec>
   

   <sec typ="macro">
      <div id="1">
        <hd>Childhood</hd>

        <p>Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, to <pn>John
        Dickens</pn>, a naval pay clerk, and his wife <pn>Elizabeth
        Barrow</pn>. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham,
        Kent. When he was ten, the family relocated to Camden Town in
        London.</p>

        <p>His early years were an idyllic time for him. He described
        himself then as a <qt>very small and
        not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy</qt>. He spent his
        time in the out-doors, reading voraciously with a particular
        fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and
        Henry Fielding. He talked later in life of his extremely
        strong memories of childhood and his continuing photographic
        memory of people and events that helped bring his fiction to
        life.</p>

        <p>His family was moderately well off and he received some
        education at a private school but all that changed when his
        father, after spending too much money entertaining and
        retaining his social position, was imprisoned for debt. At the
        age of twelve Dickens was deemed old enough to work and began
        working for 10 hours a day in <cor>Warren's boot-blacking
        factory</cor> located near the present Charing Cross railway
        station. He spent his time pasting labels on the jars of thick
        polish and earned six shillings a week. With this money he had
        to pay for his lodging and help support his family who were
        incarcerated in the nearby Marshalsea debtors' prison.</p>

        <p>After a few years his family's financial situation
        improved, partly due to money inherited from his father's
        family. His family was able to leave the Marshalsea but his
        mother did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking
        factory which was owned by a relation of hers. Dickens never
        forgave his mother for this and resentment of his situation
        and the conditions working-class people lived under became
        major themes of his works. Dickens wrote, <qt>No advice, no
        counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from
        anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!</qt></p>

        <p>In May 1827 Dickens, began work as a law clerk, a junior
        office position with potential to become a lawyer. He did not
        like the law as a profession and after a short time as a court
        stenographer he became a journalist, reporting parliamentary
        debate and traveling Britain by stagecoach to cover election
        campaigns. His journalism informed his first collection of
        pieces <w>Sketches by Boz</w> and he continued to contribute
        to and edit journals for much of his life. In his early
        twenties he made a name for himself with his first novel,
        <w>The Pickwick Papers</w>.</p>

        <p>On April 2, 1836 he married <pn>Catherine Hogarth</pn>,
        with whom he had ten children. In 1842 they traveled together
        to the United States; the trip is described in the short
        travelogue <w>American Notes</w> and is also the basis of some
        of the episodes in <w>Martin Chuzzlewit</w>.</p>

        <p>Dickens' writings were extremely popular in their day and
        were read extensively. His popularity allowed him to buy
        <pl>Gad's Hill Place</pl>, in 1856. This large house in
        Rochester, Kent was very special to Dickens as he had walked
        past it as a child and had dreamed of living in it. The area
        was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's
        <w>Henry IV, part 1</w> and this literary connection pleased
        Dickens.</p>
      </div>
      <div id="2">
       <hd>Later life</hd>

       <p>Dickens was a prolific writer who was almost always working
       on a new installment for a story and rarely missed a
       deadline.</p>

       <p>Dickens separated from his wife in 1858. In Victorian times
       divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as
       famous as he was. He continued to maintain her in a house for
       the next twenty years until she died. Although they were
       initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite
       the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Her job
       of looking after their ten children and the pressure of living
       with and keeping house for a world famous novelist certainly
       did not help. Catherine's sister Georgina moved in to help her
       but there were rumors that Charles was romantically linked to
       his sister-in-law.  An indication of his marital
       dissatisfaction was when in 1855 he went to meet his first love
       <pn>Maria Beadnell</pn>. Maria was by this time married as well
       but she seems to have fallen short of Dickens' romantic memory
       of her.</p>

       <p>On the 9th June, 1865 while returning from France to see
       <pn>Ellen Ternan</pn>, Dickens was involved in the
       <ev>Staplehurst train crash</ev> in which the first six
       carriages of the train plunged off of a bridge that was being
       repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track
       was the one Dickens was in. Dickens spent some time tending the
       wounded and dying before rescuers arrived; before finally
       leaving he remembered the unfinished manuscript for <w>Our
       Mutual Friend</w> and he returned to his carriage to retrieve
       it.</p>

       <p>Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquiry into
       the crash, as it would have become known that he was traveling
       that day with Ellen Ternan and her mother, which could have
       caused a scandal. Ellen, an actress, had been Dickens'
       companion since the break-up of his marriage and as he had met
       her in 1857 she was most likely the ultimate reason for that
       break-up. She continued to be his companion, and probably
       mistress, until his death.</p>

       <p>Although unharmed he never really recovered from the crash,
       which is most evident in the fact that his normally prolific
       writing shrank to completing <w>Our Mutual Friend</w> and starting
       the unfinished <w>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</w>. Much of his time
       was taken up with public readings from his best-loved
       novels. The shows were incredibly popular and on December 2,
       1867 Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States
       at a New York City theatre. The effort and passion he put into
       these readings with individual character voices is also thought
       to have contributed to his death.</p>

       <p>Exactly five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash,
       on June 9, 1870, he died. Contrary to his wish to be buried in
       Rochester Cathedral, he was buried in the <pl>Poets'
       Corner</pl> of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb
       reads: <qt>He was a sympathizer to the poor, the suffering, and
       the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest
       writers is lost to the world.</qt></p>

       <p>In the 1980s the historic Eastgate House in Rochester, Kent
       was converted into a Charles Dickens museum, and an annual
       Dickens Festival is held in the city. The Eastgate House was
       closed in 2005 by Medway Council as an economy measure, but a
       <qt>Dickens World</qt> theme park is scheduled to open in nearby
       Chatham in 2007. The house in Portsmouth in which Dickens was
       born has also been made into a museum.</p>
     </div>
     <div id="3">
      <hd>Novels</hd>

      <p>Dickens' writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong
      comic touch.  His satires of British aristocratic snobbery — he
      calls one character the <sc>Noble Refrigerator</sc> — are wickedly
      funny. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug
      boats, or dinner party guests to furniture are just some of
      Dickens' flights of fancy which sum up situations better than
      any simple description could.</p>

      <p>The characters themselves are among some of the most
      memorable in English literature. Certainly their names are. The
      likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs. Gamp, Micawber,
      Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers and many others are
      so well known they can easily be believed to be living a life
      outside the novels, but their eccentricities do not overshadow
      the stories. Some of these characters are grotesques; he loved
      the style of 18th century gothic romance, though it had already
      become a bit of a joke (see <pn>Jane Austen's</pn> <w>Northanger
      Abbey</w> for a parodic example).  One character most vividly
      drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching
      inns on the out-skirts of the city to the lower reaches of the
      Thames, all aspects of the capital are described by someone who
      truly loved London and spent many hours walking its streets.</p>

      <p>Most of Dickens' major novels were first written in monthly
      or weekly installments in journals such as <w>Master Humphrey's
      Clock</w> and <w>Household Words</w>, later reprinted in book
      form. These installments made the stories cheap and more
      accessible and the series of cliff-hangers every month made each
      new episode more widely anticipated. Part of Dickens? great
      talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still
      end up with a coherent novel at the end. The monthly numbers
      were illustrated by, amongst others, <sc>Phiz</sc> (a pseudonym
      for Hablot Browne).</p>

      <p>Among his best-known works are <w>Great Expectations</w>,
      <w>David Copperfield</w>, <w>The Pickwick Papers</w>, <w>Oliver
      Twist</w>, <w>Nicholas Nickleby</w>, <w>A Tale of Two
      Cities</w>, and <w>A Christmas Carol</w>.  <w>David
      Copperfield</w> is argued by some to be his best novel — it is
      certainly his most autobiographical. Lesser known, <w>Little
      Dorrit</w> is a masterpiece of acerbic satire masquerading as a
      rags-to-riches story.</p>

      <p>Dickens' novels were, among other things, works of social
      commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social
      stratification of Victorian society. Throughout his works,
      Dickens retained an empathy for the common man and a skepticism
      for the fine folk.</p>

      <p>Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the
      world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in <w>Nicholas
      Nickleby</w>. Dickens himself had a flourishing career as a
      performer, reading scenes from his works. He traveled widely in
      Britain and America on stage tours.</p>

      <p>Much of Dickens' writing seems sentimental today, like the
      death of Little Nell in <w>The Old Curiosity Shop</w>. Even
      where the leading characters are sentimental, as in <w>Bleak
      House</w>, the many other colorful characters and events, the
      satire and subplots, reward the reader. Another criticism of his
      writing is the unrealistic and unlikeliness of his plots. This
      is true but much of the time he was not aiming for realism but
      for entertainment and to recapture the picaresque and gothic
      novels of his youth.  When he did attempt realism his novels
      were often unsuccessful and unpopular. The fact that his own
      life story of happiness, then poverty, then an unexpected
      inheritance, and finally international fame was unlikely shows
      that unlikely stories are not necessarily unrealistic.</p>

      <p>All authors incorporate autobiographical elements in their
      fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable, particularly
      as he took pains to cover up what he considered his shameful,
      lowly past. The scenes from <w>Bleak House</w> of interminable
      court cases and legal arguments could only come from a
      journalist who has had to report them. Dickens' own family was
      sent to prison for poverty, a common theme in many of his books,
      in particular the Marshalsea in <w>Little Dorrit</w>. Little
      Nell in <w>The Old Curiosity Shop</w> is thought to represent
      Dickens' sister-in-law, Nicholas Nickleby's father and Wilkins
      Micawber are certainly Dickens' own father and the snobbish
      nature of Pip from <w>Great Expectations</w> is similar to the
      author himself.</p>
    </div>
    <div id="4">
      <hd>Legacy</hd>

      <p>Charles Dickens was a well known personality and his novels
      were immensely popular during his lifetime. His first full novel
      <w>The Pickwick Papers</w> brought him immediate fame and this fame
      continued right through his career. He maintained a high quality
      in all his writings and although never departing greatly from
      his typical <sc>Dickensian</sc> style he did experiment with different
      themes, moods and genres. Some of these experiments were more
      successful than others and the public's taste and appreciation
      of his various works have varied over time. He was usually keen
      to give his readers what they wanted and the monthly or weekly
      publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could
      change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. A good
      example of this are the American episodes in *Martin Chuzzlewit*
      which were put in by Dickens in response to lower than normal
      sales of the earlier chapters. In <w>Our Mutual Friend</w> the
      inclusion of the character of Riah was a positive portrayal of a
      Jewish character after he was criticised for the depiction of
      Fagin in <w>Oliver Twist</w>.</p>

      <p>His popularity has waned little since his death and he is
      still one of the best known and most read of English authors. At
      least 180 movies and TV adaptations based on Dickens? works help
      confirm his success. Many of his works were adapted for the
      stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913 a silent film
      of <w>The Pickwick Papers</w> was made. His characters were
      often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside
      his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from
      the character Mrs Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian and
      Gradgrind all entered the dictionary owing to Dickens' perfect
      portrayal of these kind of people. Sam Weller was an early
      superstar perhaps better known than his author at first and
      other characters have had their lives expanded upon by
      subsequent authors. It is likely that <w>A Christmas Carol</w>
      is his best known story with new adaptations almost every
      year. This simple morality tale with humour and pathos, for
      many, sums up the true meaning of Christmas and eclipses all his
      other Christmas stories.</p>

      <p>At a time when Britain was the major economic and political
      power of the world Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten
      poor and disadvantaged at the heart of empire. Through his
      journalism he campaigned of specific issues such as sanitation
      and the workhouse but his fiction was probably all the more
      powerful in changing opinion. He revealed the harsh lives of the
      poor and satirized the people who allowed abuses to continue,
      all in the context of a good-humoured, entertaining story which
      sold widely.  His works seem to have inspired many more people
      to address problems and inequalities, even though he poked fun
      at these well meaning philanthropists, and his influence is
      often credited with having the Marshalsea and Fleet Prisons shut
      down.</p>

      <p>Dickens may have hoped for the foundation of a literary
      dynasty through his ten children and he named some of them after
      past writers but it would have been difficult for them to be
      anywhere near as successful as their father and some of them
      seem to have inherited their grandfather?s lack of financial
      acumen. Several of his children wrote of their memories of their
      father or prepared his surviving correspondence for publication
      but his great-granddaughter, <pn>Monica Dickens</pn>, would
      follow in his footsteps as a writer of novels.</p>

      <p>His works, with their vivid descriptions of life at the time,
      mean that the whole of Victorian society is often simply
      described as Dickensian.  Following his death in 1870 a greater
      degree of realism entered literature probably in reaction to
      Dickens' own tendency towards the picaresque and
      ridiculous. Late Victorian novelists such as <pn>Samuel
      Butler</pn>, <pn>Thomas Hardy</pn> and <pn>George Gissing</pn>
      all clearly owe much to Dickens but their works are usually much
      grittier and less sentimental.  Writers continue to be
      influenced by his books and although his many faults are
      criticized few other writers can match his blend of
      characterization, gripping plots, social commentary, popular,
      critical and financial success, and his sense of humour.</p>

      <p>Dickens enjoyed unparalleled world-wide popularity in his
      lifetime. This was as much due to his skills as a storyteller as
      the introduction of cheap mass printing and distribution to a
      literate audience which now included, for the first time in
      history, a large number of the working class; the first mass
      media market. Dickens dominated <t>Victorian fiction</t> in a
      similar way that <pn>Charlie Chaplain</pn> dominated silent
      pictures, becoming not so much a man as an institution and
      mythological figure surpassing anything seen since.</p>

      <p>Dickens' most popular works were his early novels <w>The
      Pickwick Papers</w>, <w>Oliver Twist</w>, <w>Martin
      Chuzzlewit</w>, <w>A Christmas Carol</w>, and <w>David
      Copperfield</w>. But contemporary critics did not approve of his
      later, darker and more symbolic works, and the loss of the freer
      comic spirit of his early work. <pn>F.R. Leavis</pn>, in 1948,
      summed up the general consensus, asserting that Dickens'
      <qt>genius was that of a great entertainer</qt>. Typecasting
      Dickens as merely being a popular author, <cit><qt>writing in
      the least disciplined of all literary genres in the most lawless
      literary milieu of the modern world</qt><ref>eb1911</ref></cit>
      explains, why little serious attention was given to his work for
      70 years after his death. The literary genre which came to be
      known as the <t>Victorian Novel</t> was summarily dismissed as
      popular entertainment, similar to the way <t>Science Fiction</t>
      was ignored in the 1950's and 60's.</p><p>But Dickens'
      significance had never been in question to the average reader to
      whom his work was <cit><qt>instinctively felt to be true,
      original and ennobling.</qt> The oft quoted exclamation of a
      costermonger's girl in 1870 says it all, <qt>Dickens dead?  Then
      will Father Christmas die too?</qt> <ref>eb1911</ref></cit>.</p>

      <p>The importance of Dickens' work continued to grow during the
      twentieth century through innumerable stage, television and film
      adaptations, transcending the world of Victorian England in
      which they were set and establishing many of his stories and
      characters as part of Western consciousness.</p>
     </div>
    </sec>
         

Content Section Group

           <sec "body">
             <div typ="verse">
              <ver ren="center">
               <ln>John Watts took</ln>
               <ln>salt - and shal-</ln>
               <ln>lops, from </ln>
               <ln>the <em ren="underline">Zouche Phoenix</em></ln>
               <ln>London's supplies</ln>
               <ln>10 Lb Island</ln>
              </ver>
             </div>
           </sec>
     

     <sec typ="gallery">
       <i r="NTP" src="ned-01.png" l="Uncle Ned"" 
          q="in front of his house" />
       <i r="NTP" src="ned-02.png" l="Uncle Ned" 
          q="in the side of his house" />
       <i r="NTP" src="ned-03.png" l="Uncle Ned" 
          q="in the back of his house" />
       <i r="NTP" d="mon:BET4-5250" l="The Spanish Inquisition" />
     </sec>
     

     <sec typ="tasks">
       <i r="NTP" pri="A" sta="p" l="call bank about car payment" />
       <i r="NTP" d="dpg:PPH4-8437"
          pri="A" sta="x" l="finish 2nd draft of paper" />
       <i r="NTP" d="bib:FPX2-2026"
          pri="B" sta="o" l="read Catch-22" />
     </sec>
     

Documentation Section Group

     <sec typ="schema">
      # ===========================================
      # Person Entity
      # -------------------------------------------

        ## Used for all named individuals; living, dead, fictional,
        ## legendary, mythical.  An individual can be a human, animal,
        ## alien, robot, god, ghost or spirit.
      BMF.entity.person =
      attribute typ { "person" }
      & BMF.element.person.sec*

      ## section element for person entities.
      BMF.element.person.sec = element sec {
      (BMF.section.hierarchy?
      | BMF.section.terms?
      | BMF.section.related?
      | BMF.section.person.meta?
      | BMF.section.scope?
      | BMF.section.intro?
      | BMF.section.macro?
      | BMF.section.context?
      | BMF.section.usage?
      | BMF.section.bibliography?
      | BMF.section.reference?
      | BMF.section.identity?
      | BMF.section.history?)* }?
     </sec>
   

Burr Metadata Section Group

     <sec typ="references">
       <i r="author-of" e="m" d="bib:GOW5-8744">
         <a>The Diamond Age</a> <b>[novel] / Neal Stephenson.
         New York : Bantam Books, 1995.</b></i>

       <i r="author-of" e="m" d="bib:UAA5-1783">
         <a>People of the talisman</a>
         <b>; The secret of Sinharat [novel] / Leigh Brackett.
         – New York : Ace Books, cop. 1964.</b></i>

       <i r="consulted" e="c" d="aut:GVE3-6267">
         <a>Slashdot.org</a>
         <b>; news for nerds, stuff that matters [web site] <lb />
         URL:<url src="http://slashdot.org">http://slashdot.org</url>.
         <lb />
         <m>An important news source for hi-tech news and discussion,
         for the technically literate, geek sub-culture.</m></i>
     </sec>
   

<sec typ="identity">
  <descriptor>Charles Dickens</descriptor>
  <qualifier>Eng. Novelist, 1812-1870</qualifier>
  <exchangeID>aut:UJA7-6676</exchangeID>
  <topicspace>
    <i pfx="aut" url="http://chenla.org/bram/aut" />
    <i pfx="evn" url="http://chenla.org/bram/evn" />
  </topicspace>
  <replacedBy></replacedBy>
  <version>aut:UJA7-6676-4.xml</version>
  <previous>aut:UJA7-6676-3.xml</previous>
  <refresh>2005-09-16T12:37</refresh>
  <owner>brad@chenla.org&lt;Brad Collins&gt;</owner>
  <copyright>Public Domain</copyright>
  <created>2004-07-08T1732, brad@chenla.org</created>
</sec>
   

<sec typ="history">
  <log>
    <stamp>PR3, 2005-09-16T10:33, Brad Collinsbrad@chenla.org</stamp>
    <comment>added type attributes to topicspace and changed
    refresh from period to date.</comment>
  </log>
  <log>
    <stamp>PR.2, 2005-07-19T15:02, brad@chenla.org</stamp>
    <comment>Massive overhaul of everything.  Starting proper
    version control with this version.</comment>
  </log>
  <log>
    <stamp>E1, 2004-07-08T1732, brad@chenla.org</stamp>
    <comment>Created Burr</comment>
  </log>
</sec>
     

Reserved BXIDs

We had originally used a default file-name for defining Brambles and topicspaces in the root directory for the bramble and in the directory for each topicspace.

But when developing applications we found it was far easier to treat the definitions for brambles and topicspaces just like any other Burr.

So we hit on the idea of reserving one BXID in each bramble and topicspace for use in defining the contents of brambles and topicspaces. The reserved id is:

   XXX0-0000.
         

Each bramble has a directory called `root' which is reserved for holding the Root Burr for the Bramble.

So the path for the root Burr for a bramble will always be:

   [BRAMBLE-ROOT]/bram/root/X/X/X/0/0/0/0/0/XXX0-0000.xml
   

And the path for the root Burr in the authority topicspace which uses the prefix `aut' would be:

   [BRAMBLE-ROOT]/bram/aut/X/X/X/0/0/0/0/0/XXX0-0000.xml
         

This approach might seem strange at first, but this makes referencing the root Burr for a Bramble or Topicspace no different from any other Burr.

Defining Topicspaces

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="./xml.css" type="text/css"?>
<BURR typ="topicspace">
  <sec typ="hierarchy">
   <i r="TT" e="t" d="aaa:AAA0-0000" l="Bramble"
      q="Local Bramble" />
   <i r="PT"  e="t" d="aut:AAA0-0000" l="Authority"
      q="Librarium authority topicspace" />
   <i r="NT"  e="t" d="top:HGW6-7648" l="person"
      q="human being, living or dead" />
   <i r="NT"  e="t" d="top:BVI6-1681" l="person"
      q="fictional character" />
   <i r="NT"  e="t" d="top:RYT0-1638" l="person"
      q="mythical or legendary character" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="terms">
    <i r="PT" typ="index" l="Authority" q="Librarium topicspace" />
    <i r="UF" typ="abbrev" l="aut" q="Authority; topicspace prefix" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="meta">
    <entityType l="topicspace" />
    <topicName a="authority topicspace"
               l="authority topicspace"/>
    <dates>
      <i typ= "created" dt="2005.04.15" pl=""
         l="created 15 April.2005 in Bangkok" />
    </dates>
    <responsibility l="Brad Collins" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="scope">
   <p>Used for authority records for all specific persons and
   creatures (alive, dead, fictional or mythical).</p>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="usage">
   <p>This topicspace should not be used for records describing a
   species, only only specific instances of individuals.</p>

   <p>So the term <sc>Skunk</sc> should not be included in the
   authority topicspace, but <sc>Pepe Le Pui</sc> which is the name of
   a fictional, cartoon skunk character Looney Toons (a series of
   animations from Warner Brothers) should be included.</p>

   <p>The <sc>President of the United States</sc> is an office and
   title so shouldn't be included, but <sc>Richard Nixon</sc> who was
   President of the United States in the early 1970's should be
   included.</p>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="identity">
    <descriptor>Authority</descriptor>
    <qualifier>Librarium topicspace</qualifier>
    <exchangeID>aut:AAA0-0000</exchangeID>
    <topicspace>
      <i pfx="aut" url="http://chenla.org/bram/aut" />
    </topicspace>
    <replacedBy></replacedBy>
    <version>aut:AAA0-0000--D1.xml</version>
    <previous></previous>
    <refresh>7500000</refresh>
    <owner>brad@chenla.org&lt;Brad Collins&gt;</owner>
    <copyright>Public Domain</copyright>
    <dates>
      <i v="15.04.2005 13:11" rsp="brad@chenla.org" />
    </dates>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="history">
   <log>
     <stamp>D2, 2005-04-15T12:11, Brad Collins brad@chenla.org</stamp>
     <comment>created XML Burr from plan page.</comment>
   </log>
  </sec>
</BURR>
       

Bramble Directory Structure

Brambles are typically kept in a directory called bram, called bramble root and are located either in a users home directory, ~/bram/ or in document root in a Web server or FTP site.

Inside bramble root, burrs are sorted into folders for each topicspace they are from. One folder for each topicspace. In this way it is easy to keep Burrs from different topicspaces separated from each other.

In each topicspace folder, Burrs are organized into directories based on their BXID. So, for example the BXID aut:BKV4-6537 would be found in the the following directories:

By using a common directory structure for all Brambles, we refer to a Burr using little more than its BXID. So the BXID: aut:BKV4-6537 with a topicspace declaration: file:///home/user/bram/aut">file:///home/user/bram/aut, for a private Bramble, or http://example.com/bram/aut for a public Bramble would respectively expand to:

   ~/bram/aut/B/K/V/4/6/5/3/7/BKV4-6537.xml
   

or

   http://example.com/bram/aut/B/K/V/4/6/5/3/7/BKV4-6537.xml
   

Defining Brambles

Brambles are defined through a special Burr entity-type (more on entity-types below) called, as you might have guess, a "bramble".

A single Bramble Burr is used to include all the topicspaces in the local bramble.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<BURR typ="bramble">
  <sec typ="hierarchy">
   <i r="TT" e="t" d="root:XXX0-0000" l="Bramble"
      q="Local Bramble" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="dpg:XXX0-0000" l="Deerpig"
      q="Personal topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="aut:XXX0-0000" l="Authority"
      q="Librarium authorities topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="bib:XXX0-0000" l="Bibliographic"
      q="Librarium bibliographic topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="dic:XXX0-0000" l="Dictionary"
      q="Librarium dictionary topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="evn:XXX0-0000" l="Events"
      q="Librarium events topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="geo:XXX0-0000" l="Places"
      q="Librarium Geographic topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="top:XXX0-0000" l="Topics"
      q="Librarium Topic topicspace" />
   <i r="NT" e="t" d="bmf:XXX0-0000" l="Burr Metadata Framework"
      q="BMF documentation topicspace" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="terms">
    <i r="PT" typ="index"  l="local bramble"
       q="local bramble on host bulma" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="meta">
    <entityType l="topicspace" />
    <topicName a="Local Bramble on bulma"
               l="Local Bramble on bulma"/>
    <dates>
      <i typ="created" dt="2005.04.13" pl=""
         l="created on 13 April 2005 in Bangkok" />
    </dates>
    <responsibility d="" l="Brad Collins" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="scope">
    <p>This is the local bramble for the user <sc>deerpig</sc> on the
    host <sc>bulma</sc>.</p>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="usage">
    <p>The local bramble collects together all Burrs kept by a single
    user/account or on a single machine or site. Burrs are sorted into
    directory trees with a separate directory tree for each
    topicspace.</p>

    <p>Topicspaces may be local and private, or local copies of public
    or shared topicspaces other places.</p>

    <p>The topicspace <sc>aaa</sc> is reserved as the default
    topicspace for defining local Brambles in the same way that
    <sc>localhost</sc> is the default hostname on Unix-like
    systems.</p>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="identity">
    <descriptor>Bramble</descriptor>
    <qualifier>local bramble</qualifier>
    <exchangeID>aaa:AAA0-0000</exchangeID>
    <topicspace>
      <i pfx="aut" url="http://chenla.org/bram/aut" />
      <i pfx="evn" url="http://chenla.org/bram/evn" />
      <i pfx="bib" url="http://chenla.org/bram/bib" />
      <i pfx="geo" url="http://chenla.org/bram/geo" />
    </topicspace>
    <replacedBy></replacedBy>
    <version>aaa:AAA0-0000--D1.xml</version>
    <previous></previous>
    <refresh>7500000</refresh>
    <owner>brad@chenla.org &lt;Brad Collins&gt;</owner>
    <copyright>Public Domain</copyright>
    <dates>
      <i r="created" v="2005.04.13"  rsp="brad@chenla.org" />
    </dates>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="history">
      <log>
        <stamp>D1, 2005-04-13, Brad Collins brad@chenla.org</stamp>
        <comment>created XML Burr.</comment>
      </log>
  </sec>
</BURR>
       

The BXID: Easy on the Eye, Ear and Memory

For BMF to work we need a system which is globally unique, but also is easy to remember and quickly and accurately written down in awkward situations, like on the street or in a crowded bar (ie. the five pint rule: if you write it down in a bar after drinking five pints and can still read it in the morning it's a good system).

In a recent paper on the same topic, Sheldon Brahms wrote,

He recommended development of a similar system. Since we needed a practical solution for us to continue development of BMF we sat down and began trying out a number of ideas, most of which quickly became un-usable, in order to create enough possible IDs to build a global URI system.

Each BXID which is made up of three letters from the roman alphabet followed by a number then separated by a dash and then a four digit integer. GOL2-1023 could be remembered as Golum Ten Twenty-three. This produces over 175 million possible ids.

Here are a few examples of BXIDs:

   SBY7-8413
   CED2-8235
   GUL6-0282
   SKD3-0655
   QLV8-2404
   

In order for a BXID to be unique, every BXID must belong to a topicspace. A three letter prefix for a topicspace is prefixed to a BXID in the same way that namespace prefixes are used in XML namespaces.

Here are a few examples of BXIDs with topicspaces:

   aut:SBY7-8413
   geo:CED2-8235
   aut:CED2-8235
   evn:CED2-8235
   evn:GUL6-0282
   

In the example above, note that the BXID CED2-8235 is used by the geo, aut and evn topicspaces. These are all valid universally unique ids because they belong to different topicspaces.

Scholia

Scholia can be external commentary, but marginal as well (literally in the margins). Anything in BMF can have Scholia attatched to them, including other scholia — you can make comments about comments.

A Scholia must have a target (tar) attribute which points to a Burr and optionally the section, div and paragraph or line in the Burr using xpath notation.

A BMF scholia may only use the following sections — note, reference, identity, and history. The identity section may be automatically generated by an application.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<BURR typ="scholia" tar="aut:VTW0-0877:intro/">
  <sec typ="note">
     <hd>mega crap</hd>
     <p>I think this whole section is rubbish.</p>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="reference">
     <i ref="eb2004" d="bib:WOL0-3010" l="Enclopædia Britannica 2004." />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="identity">
     <descriptor>mega crap</descriptor>
     <exchangeID>myn:KLL2-5605</exchangeID>
     <topicspace>
        <i pfx="aut" typ="http://chenla.org/bram/aut" />
        <i pfx="myn" typ="http://example.org/bram/myn" />
     </topicspace>
     <created>2005-12-20T13:48, brad@chenla.org</created>
  </sec>
</BURR>
   

Notice that there are two topicspace definitions, one for the Scholia which has the prefix "myn" and the other for the Burr that the scholia is commenting on with the prefix "aut".

This approach allows comments from multiple authors, private, shared or public.

In this example there is no owner attached to the scholia so ownership is inherited from the topicspace it belongs to.

Glossa

Not all comments and annotations are block level elements. An annotation can be a translation, comment or explanatory text about a word, phrase, paragraph in a text, in other words a gloss (or perhaps we should use the Med. Latin glossa ).

If this is all there was to a Glossa we could just use a Scholia, (which can serve as footnotes). But what if you want to include additional semantic markup to multiple parts of a passage? Or create running commentary along side a text.

Glossa are still very much in early development, but the problem raises a number of issues which go to the heart of a distributed shared read/write REPL.

The simplest approach would be to just create a local copy of a Burr and then mark it up however you wanted to. But this is a branching (as used in version control system) of the Burr rather than making commentary or glossing an existing text.

A Glossa can be thought of as an external layer of markup on top of another text.

I can only see two ways of accomplishing this. You can use Xpath to indicate all the text that you want to markup, and have a distinct path for each item linked to the changed text.

This is the approach we are using for Scholia, but if you are adding many small tags to a text this quickly becomes a nightmare both from a authoring and processing point of view.

The second approach is to duplicate the body of the text and then adding or changing inline markup.

So if you have the following marked up text:

  <sec typ="scope">
    <p>In full <hi ren="italics">Charles John Huffam Dickens</hi>,
    English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian
    era.  His many volumes include such works as <hi ren="underline">A
    Christmas Carol</hi>, <hi ren="italics">David Copperfield</hi>, <hi
    ren="italics">Bleak House</hi>, <hi ren="italics">A Tale of Two
    Cities</hi>, <hi ren="italics">Great Expectations</hi>, and <hi
    ren="italics">Our Mutual Friend</hi>.</p>
  </sec>
[... the rest of the Burr ...]
</BURR>
       

First strip out the inline markup, leaving only block level markup, so you have the following:

  <p>In full Charles John Huffam Dickens English novelist, generally
  considered the greatest of the Victorian era.  His many volumes
  include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak
  House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual
  Friend.</p>
   

Then import the passage to a Glossa and add new markup:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<BURR typ="glossa" tar="aut:VTW0-0877:scope">
  <sec typ="scope">
    <p>In full <pn>Charles John Huffam Dickens</pn> English
    novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian
    era.  His many volumes include such works as <w>A Christmas
    Carol</w>, <w>David Copperfield</w>, <w>Bleak House</w>, <w>A
    Tale of Two Cities</w>, <w>Great Expectations</w>, and <w>Our
    Mutual Friend</w>.</p>
  </sec>
[... the rest of the Burr ...]
</BURR>
   

The processing could be as simple as toggling between the original and the glossa, seeing both texts side by side, or could be as fancy as merging the two versions together into a single view (using an xml diff and merge utility).

For this to work, it will have to operate on whole sections, not just a single paragraph in a longer passage. It is also important that block level markup is retained, unless you are proposing complete, alternate versions of a section (say an earlier draft of a poem).

I tend to think this should be possible but not the best way of offering alternate passages of a text which could be better done by creating a different div Burr for each text.

Processing applications can include different options for creating Glossa. So you could strip all inline tags, or keep some or all.

Glossa and textual corruption.

A Glossa is not allowed to alter the original text. After a glossa has been created, a validator should be used which strips out the markup and runs a diff against the original text to insure that the text has not been altered. If it has, the text must be changed back to match the original before the glossa is validated.

Scholia, Glossa and versions of Burrs.

Arch treats everything as a branch; there is no difference between a local copy and the copy that everyone commits changes to. BMF is designed the same way.

So it's important that both Scholia and Glossa include version numbers of Burrs which they are commenting on. In this way, if the text in the Burr is changed, the commentary and markup can still be used, using a earlier version of the Burr

Advantages of Scholia and Glossa

One of the most powerful things about this approach is it's flexibility. Scholia could be added to the bottom of a section as threaded comments from multiple people. They could be added as private footnotes to a text you are studying for a paper, or they could be sent to someone else as comments as part of an editing or review process.

Multiple sets of glossa could be used to publish alternate views of a text, so that you could publish an edition of Darwin which had commentary and glossa from both a scientific point of view as well as a religious, creationist rant against it.

The reader could toggle between the different commentaries as well as see them side by side or merge them into a combined chaotic flamewar.

This approach would make a project like Wikipedia far easier, in that each article could use a base text which is used by multiple parties to add their own comments and commentary which reflect their point of view and provide an alternate to directly editing the text.

X-Path for Scholia

BMF uses X-Path to indicate block level items which Scholia are attached to [XPATH].

For example, to indicate the third paragraph (numbering starts with 0) in the intro section of a Burr we could use an X-Path like the following:

   //sec[@typ='intro']/p[2]
   

Since the structure of Burrs are very regular, it might be better to provide simplified notation:

   //intro/p[2]
   

But what about items like a item in a related section?

   //related/i[3]
   

or more specifically

   //related/i[@l='Alfred Dickens']
   

The second is better in that it would work even if the list were reordered, but it would be difficult to automate because we would have to establish rules for each type of section.

So here is a complete example of what a scholia Burr type about part of the macro note in the Charles Dickens Burr:

<BURR typ="scholia" ptr="aut:UJA7-6676//macro/div[3]/p[1]">
  <sec typ="hierarchy">
    <i r="TT" e="t" d="dpg:AAA0-0000"
       l="Deerpig" q="topicspace" />
    <i r="BT" e="d" d="dpg:GSO5-2743"
       l="2005-01-31" q="day page" />
    <i r="BT" e="p" d="aut:UJA7-6676"
       l="Dickens, Charles John Huffman" q="Eng. novelist, 1812-1870" />
    <i r="PT" e="s" d="dpg:BGL5-3748"
       l="Robert Louis Stevenson on Dickens's Christmas Books" q="scholia" />
  </sec>
  <sec typ="body">
    <cit>
     <quo>
      <p>I wonder if you have ever read Dicken's <sc>Christmas
      Book's</sc>... they are too much perhaps.  I have only read two
      yet, but I have cried my eyes out, and had a terrible fight not to
      sob.  But, oh, dear God, they are <em>good</em> -- and I feel so
      good after them -- I shall do good and lose no time -- I want to
      go out and comfort someone -- I <em>shall</em> give money.  Oh,
      what a jolly thing it is for man to have written books like these
      and just filled people's hearts with pity.</p>
     </quo>
     <bib>
      <pn>Robert Louis Stevenson</pn> to an unidentified
      correspondent.<ref>1</ref>
     </bib>
    </cit>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="reference">
    <i ref="1">Quoted in the <ser>Dickensian</ser>, vol. 16, 1920, p.200.</i>
  </sec>
  <sec typ="identity">
    <exchangeID>aut:UJA7-6676</exchangeID>
    <topicspace>
      <i pfx="aut" typ="local" />
    </topicspace>
    <owner>brad@chenla.org&lt;Brad Collins&gt;</owner>
    <created>2006-01-31T17:03, brad@chenla.org</created>
  </sec>
</BURR>
       

A potential problem with this is that the ptr address points to a Burr but not a specific version number of a Burr. If the Burr changes, the Scholia could become a dead link.

Comments may be lost and not carried forward if the text is changed.

So the spec will make it mandatory that the Burr won't be broken if a scholia's pointer doesn't match with say, the paragraph, it should first check for previous versions of the Burr for a match. If previous versions are not available, then it should match with the div, if not the div, it should match with the section, and if not with the section than with the Burr. Only then would the scholia be considered a dead link.

Scholia should always point to the most general block level element possible. It's the Benjamin Franklin approach to linking. Don't link to a line or a paragraph if you can point to a div, don't point to a div if you can point to a section, and don't point to a section if you can point to a Burr.

Documenting BMF

The concept of documentation in BMF is somewhat different from other documentation systems which people are used to.

First of all, documentation on the BMF framework and markup language is integrated with BMF, it is interwoven within the framework itself.

In most languages, documentation for the language is provided in a separate file format like Texinfo, HTML or Docbook. Help files are kept in yet another file format and accessed through separate help applications or browsers.

Emacs is the exception. Emacs lisp (Elisp) encourages the inclusion of detailed documentation as part of the source code itself. These document strings in Lisp are not simply comments which are ignored, they provide invaluable context based documentation.

This is similar to the idea of literate programming. Literate programs combine source and documentation in a single file. Literate programming tools then parse the file to produce either readable documentation or compilable source. For compiled languages like C, this approach is about as close as you'll be able to get to what is available in Lisp.

BMF documentation is treated like any other content, so accessing the documentation for the language is just part of whatever other content that is available locally or over a network.

This also means that enumerated values used in BMF are defined in BMF in relation to Burrs defining concepts behind each value.

   BTG con   parent (father or mother)
   BT  sym    . parent (Eng. father or mother)
   PT  enum   .. parent
   UF+ con    .. father
   OR  con    .. mother
   

So when you look up the extended relationship value for parent it leads you to definitions of the broader generic term for the concept for parent, the broader term which is the English word for parent, and indicates that father AND mother can be used for the term parent.

In this way, BMF documentation is interwoven with all content which is encoded in BMF.

Self documentation for everything else

BMF extends the concept of self documentation to any type of content encoded in a Burr. There is no reason why there shouldn't be documentation for all types of content. At first this might sound a bit strange, but any type of information could benefit from documentation.

A dictionary is documentation for human languages providing definitions, pronunciation and usage. Historical dictionaries also provide some context. Encyclopedias can also be seen in some contexts as documentation for persons, places, events and concepts.

The context and usage sections are provided exactly for this purpose.

One of the design goals for BMF was for it to be suitable for encoding libraries designed to last hundreds or even thousands of years.

But one of the biggest problems with information is that once you loose the context that it was written in, along with unspoken assumptions of facts and usage shared by everyone at the time of writing you have lost the ability to understand what an author was trying to communicate.

Adding documentation about etiquette, popular culture, slang, superstitions, urban legends related to a concept or topic would be very helpful to people from other cultures and countries, as well as for future generations.