question for a friend

[Richard Tobin]

> But yes, there are
> situations where you want to impose multiple hierarchic structures over the
> same linear data. An obvious one is logical structure vs layout structure
> (e.g. sections and pages) another is logical structure vs change history and
> authorship. 

> I'm only aware of two answers:

Another solution, for some purposes, is to have two documents, one for
each hierarchy.  Of course, you don't want to to duplicate the data
itself.  We avoid this by using "standoff markup", which we implement
with XLinks (we have our own software to perform the transclusion
process).

The context we use this in is markup of linguistic corpora, and we
often have an ID on every word.  For the Shakespeare example it might
be something like this:

fragment of base file (othello.xml):

<w id="w20">charged</w>
<w id="w21">withal</w>
<punct id="p5">,</punct>
<w id="w22">I</w>
<w id="w23">won</w>
<w id="w24">his</w>
<w id="w25">daughter</w>
<punct id="p6">.</punct>
<w id="w26">A</w>
<w id="w27">maiden</w>
<w id="w28">never</w>
<w id="w29">bold</w>
<punct id="p7">;</punct>
<w id="w30">Of</w>
<w id="w31">spirit</w>

fragment of speech file:

<!ENTITY o SYSTEM "othello.xml">
<!ATTLIST speech 
          href      CDATA    #IMPLIED
          xml:link  CDATA    #FIXED "simple"
          show      CDATA    #FIXED "embed"
          actuate   CDATA    #FIXED "auto">

<speech id="s5" href="&o;#id(w5)..id(p6)/>
<speech id="s6" href="&o;#id(w26)..id(p9)/>

fragment of line file:

<line id="l10" href="&o;#id(w22)..id(p7)/>

-- Richard

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