Source: https://fhiso.org/TR/cev-rdfa-bindings
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 16:35:30+00:00

Document:
This is a third public draft of a standard documenting the proposed usage of the FHISO Citation Elements standard in RDFa. This document is not an FHISO standard and is not endorsed by the FHISO membership. It may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time.
In particular, some examples in this draft use citation elements that are not yet included in the draft Citation Element: Vocabulary, and source derivation types that may be standardised in a future Source Derivation Vocabulary. These are likely to be changed as these vocabularies progress.
The public tsc-public@fhiso.org mailing list is the preferred place for comments, discussion and other feedback on this draft.
FHISO's suite of Citation Elements standard provides an extensible framework and vocabulary for encoding all the data about a genealogical source that might reasonably be included in a formatted citation to that source.
This information is represented as a sequence of citation elements, logically self-contained pieces of information about a source. This document defines a means by which citation elements may be identified and tagged within an XML or HTML formatted citation, allowing a computer to extracted them in a systematic manner. The tagging of citation elements is done using a standard set of HTML attributes known as RDFa attributes, which can also be used in XML languages besides HTML.
Citation Elements: General Concepts. This standard defines the general concepts used in FHISO's suite of Citation Elements standards, and the basic framework and data model underpinning them.
Citation Elements: Vocabulary. This standard defines a collection of citation elements allowing the representation of information normally found in formatted citations to diverse types of source.
Citation Elements: Bindings for GEDCOM X. This standard defines extensions to the GEDCOM X data model and its JSON and XML serialisations to allow citation elements to be represented in GEDCOM X.
Citation Elements: Bindings for ELF. This standard defines how citation elements should be represented in FHISO's Extensible Legacy Format (ELF), a format based on and compatible with GEDCOM 5.5.1, but with the addition of a new extensibility mechanism.
Not all of these documents are yet at the stage of having a first public draft.
Where this standard gives a specific technical meaning to a word or phrase, that word or phrase is formatted in bold text in its initial definition, and in italics when used elsewhere. The key words must, must not, required, shall, shall not, should, should not, recommended, not recommended, may and optional in this standard are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 2119].
An application is conformant with this standard if and only if it follows all the requirements and prohibitions contained in this document, as indicated by use of the words must, must not, required, shall and shall not, and the relevant parts of its normative references. Standards referencing this standard must not loosen any of the requirements and prohibitions made by this standard, nor place additional requirements or prohibitions on the constructs defined herein.
Adding requirements or prohibitions is disallowed so as to preserve interoperability between applications: data generated by one conformant application must always be acceptable to another conformant application, regardless of what additional standards each may conform to.
This standard depends on the Citation Elements: General Concepts and Basic Concepts for Genealogical Standards standards. To be conformant with this standard, an application must also be conformant with [CEV Concepts] and [Basic Concepts]. Concepts defined in those standards are used here without further definition.
Readers are advised to read at least the introduction to [CEV Concepts] before reading this standard.
Indented text in coloured boxes, such as preceding paragraph, does not form a normative part of this standard, and is labelled as either an example or a note.
Editorial notes, such as this, are used to record outstanding issues, or points where there is not yet consensus; they will be resolved and removed for the final standard. Examples and notes will be retained in the standard.
The tagging of citation elements in formatted citations is done using a standard set of HTML attributes known as RDFa attributes which are defined in [RDFa Core]. Compliance with this FHISO standard does not require full RDFa compliance: support for the full [RDFa Core] is optional, and RDFa features other than those for which support is required by this standard should not be used when compatibility between implementations is desirable.
The specification of [RDFa Core] assumes a detailed working knowledge of the RDF graph model. A more accessible introduction to RDFa can be found in the [RDFa Primer], but FHISO's use of RDFa attributes here is limited, and this standard is designed to be used without any knowledge of RDFa or RDF. An application parsing RDFa attributes according to this specification does not need a full RDFa parser, far less to support the full RDF graph model.
These attributes may be used in HTML or any XML-based markup language, but for the purpose of tagging citation elements in formatted citations it is recommended that they be used in XHTML. The language they are used in is referred to here as the host language.
Applications wishing to implement a fully-compliant RDFa parser for HTML will find the formal specification on the use of RDFa in HTML in two standards, [HTML+RDFa] and [XHTML+RDFa].
In the simplest case, the citation element name (which is an IRI) can be put in a property attribute on an XML or HTML element, and the citation element value is the text contents of the element. The particular type of element on which the attributes are placed is not relevant.
The title of the book can be tagged by adding a property attribute to the existing <i> element. As written above, no element contains just the author's name, as the <p> element also encloses the title; however author's name can be wrapped in an <span> element and a property attributed added to that. HTML's <span> element has no defined meaning of its own, but exists to provide a place for attributes such as this.
title: "Les ancêtres de Charlemagne"
Note the citation element value of title citation element contains no line break, despite the HTML being split across two lines. This is because [CEV Concepts] says applications should whitespace-normalise citation element values.
In many examples in this standard, including the previous one, the list of citation elements is given as a list of name, value pairs with both presented as a string. In practice the citation element value is a localisation set containing one string which is additionally tagged with a datatype and possibly a language tag. This detail is frequently omitted from examples where it is not germane to the point being illustrated.
The vocab and prefix attributes are used to allow the creation of shorthand IRIs per §2. Full support for their RDFa semantics is required by this standard, except that the use of an initial context to provide defaults is optional.
The typeof attribute is used to locate formatted citations per §3.1. Support for any other use of this attribute is optional; any unsupported use of it shall be marked as a source-exclusion element per §3.2 and is not further processed by this standard.
The property attribute contains a citation element name as per §4. Full support for its RDFa semantics is required, other than when it is used in constructs that define source-exclusion elements, and except for the special behaviour RDFa gives to an rdfa:copy property for which support is optional.
The content attribute can be used to represent a citation element value as per §4.2. Full support for its RDFa semantics is required.
The href and src attribute can be used to represent a citation element value as per §4.2. They are not formally considered RDFa attributes but are part of the host language. Full support for their RDFa semantics is required if the host language permit their use, as HTML does.
The datetime attribute can also be used to represent a citation element value as per §4.2 if the host language is HTML.
The xml:lang and lang attributes are used to represent a language tag as per §4.4. Full support for their RDFa semantics is required.
The datatype attribute is used to identify the datatype of strings in a citation element value. Full support for its RDFa semantics is required.
The rel and rev attributes are used to denote layer derivation links per §5.3. Support for any other use of this attribute is optional; any unsupported use of them shall be marked as a source-exclusion element per §3.2 and is not further processed by this standard.
The about, inlist and resource attributes are not used by this standard. Support for their RDFa semantics is optional. Any unsupported use of them shall be marked as a source-exclusion element per §3.2 and is not be processed by this standard, except when the presence of one of these attributes (but not its particular value) prevents the recognition of nested source-type element per §5.1.
In addition, when the host language is HTML, special meaning is attached to the <time> element.
In this standard, unless otherwise stated, the term HTML refers to any backwards-compatible version of HTML, and XHTML refers to any version of HTML that is also well-formed XML.
This definition of HTML includes HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1, HTML5 and HTML 5.1. For the last two, it includes both their XML and non-XML forms. It will include future editions of HTML5 too, assuming they retain backwards compatibility. This definition of XHTML includes not just the standards that are named XHTML, but also the XML forms of HTML5 and later.
The use of HTML, or a subset of HTML, is often permitted in genealogy applications to allow users to add formatting to text in various contexts. It is recommended that applications which allow users to edit or manually lay out formatted citations should permit the use of some HTML elements in them.
[CEV Concepts] recommends that if high quality formatted citations are required, users should be allowed to fine-tune the presentation by hand because it is not anticipated that an application will always do a perfect job. Many citation styles use italics and some use bold, underlining or other text-level formatting when formatting certain citation elements. In order to allow the user to fine-tune the use of such formatting, the user should be allowed to edit the formatted citation as HTML.
If an application automatically generates an HTML formatted citation from a citation element set, it should add RDFa attributes in such a manner that will another application conformant with this standard will be able to extract the citation elements again. This should not be an application's principal means of serialising a citation element set: applications should prefer a format that serialises the citation element set directly rather than after converting it to a formatted citation.
RDFa attributes are not the recommended way of serialising citation element sets primarily because it requires creating a formatted citation. Doing this to a reasonable standard is non-trivial, and results in particular language and style being favoured. This standard is provided for situations when a formatted citation is desired or required anyway. For example, much genealogical research has been published online in HTML and includes formatted citations. If they are tagged according to this standard, these formatted citations can be copied into a genealogy application which can convert them back to a citation element set.
The process for generating a formatted citation, with or without RDFa attributes, is outside the scope of this standard, and this standard does not require applications to produce formatted citations.
Application parsing an HTML or XML file for citation elements in accordance with this standard shall follow the steps outlined in this section. Conformant applications may deviate from this processing sequence only if it has no effect on the observable behaviour of the application.
In particular, this processing sequence implies multiple passes over the input document. Applications may merge the steps in such a way as to reduce the number of passes needed providing the behaviour is the same as specified here.
The application shall first parse the host language according to the applicable standards for the host language. The application may carry out any form of validation that is defined for the host language and reject input that fails. The application may also accept input that is not well-formed according to the rules of the host language, and parse it in some implementation-defined manner. It is recommended that XML that is not well-formed be rejected.
Much HTML found on the Internet does not strictly conform to the applicable HTML standards. Applications may parse invalid HTML for citation elements, but are not required to, and may deviate from the parsing procedure set out in the HTML standards in doing so: this is permitted provided the application correctly parses valid HTML. The purpose of this relaxation is to allow applications to use commodity HTML parsers that deliberately do not precisely follow HTML standard in the interest of being more tolerant of malformed HTML.
Any shorthand IRIs in datatype, property, rel, rev and typeof attributes shall be expanded according to the rules in §2.
Those property attributes that identify citation elements shall be located according to the process defined in §3, and the value of the property attribute becomes the citation element name.
The citation element value shall be a localisation set constructed according to §4.
The document shall be processed according to [RDFa Core] which results in a sequence of RDF triples, from which citation element triples shall be identified per §3.2 of this standard.
Each RDF triple shall be converted into a citation element using the process given in §4.5.
The [CEV Concepts] standard makes heavy use of IRIs as identifiers, as does RDFa. In particular, the datatype, property, rel, rev and typeof attributes contain IRIs.
The datatype attribute shall contain a single IRI. The property, rel, rev and typeof attributes shall contain a list of IRIs separated by whitespace. Leading and trailing whitespace is discarded.
A common reason why multiple IRIs might be present is when two IRIs exist with similar meanings and the creator of the citation wishes to use both for compatibility.
Here two alternative IRIs are used to tag the title, presumably because the citation's creator anticipated it being processed by applications that support [Dublin Core] metadata as well as FHISO's Citation Elements standards. A parser conforming to this standard will treat both IRIs as valid and create two citation elements, both with the same citation element value, however if the Dublin Core IRI is not known to the application, it will likely be ignored.
In the uses described by this standard the property attribute will always contain a citation element term, and the datatype attribute will always contain a datatype name. The typeof attribute will contain an IRI that allows this standard's use of RDFa to be distinguished from any other uses also present in the document. The rev and rel attributes will contain a source derivation type to denote citation layer links.
RDFa provides two separate mechanisms for abbreviating the IRIs in these attributes: by setting a local default vocabulary, and by using prefixes to create compact URIs expressions (CURIEs) as a form of prefix notation. Applications processing formatted citations in accordance with this standard must support both of these mechanisms. Expansion of terms using the local default vocabulary shall be done before the expansion of CURIEs. An application must behave as if all datatype, property, rel, rev and typeof attributes have been expanded before continuing to process the data.
Applications may opt to expand these attributes on demand, provided the effect is the same. The typeof attribute is the only one whose value invariably needs expanding.
A term in RDFa is an XML NCName that also permits slash (U+002F) as a non-leading character. It matches the term production given in §7.4.3 of [RDFa Core].
The definitions of NameChar and NCNameStartChar are found in [XML] and [XML Names] respectively.
The [CEV Concepts] standard also uses the word "term", and defines it to mean a vocabulary item identified by an IRI. To minimise confusion, this standard never uses the word "term" in that sense, and only uses it in the RDFa sense given above.
When a datatype, property, rel, rev or typeof attribute contains a term, it shall be converted to an IRI by prepending the local default vocabulary if one exists. The local default vocabulary is an IRI which is specified using a vocab attribute. It applies to the element where it is specified and to all elements in its content unless overridden with another vocab attribute.
Terms look similar to relative IRIs and this process is similar to resolving relative IRIs against a base IRI, but the process of applying a local default vocabulary is simpler as the two strings are simply concatenated without understanding the structure of the IRI.
Markup generators should ensure that a vocab attribute is present if terms are being used when compatibility between implementations is desirable. When these attributes are used in a host language other than HTML, the definition of the host language may provide a default vocabulary that applies in the event that no vocab attribute is found; HTML provides no such default.
If no local default vocabulary was found, a parser may use an initial context as described in §9 of [RDFa Core] to resolve the term to an IRI; if not, or if it was not found in the initial context, the term shall be ignored. When an initial context is used, it must be the standard one for the host language: implementations must not define their own initial context.
In considering the authorName term, a parser looks for a vocab attribute on the <span> or the enclosing <p> element. No such attribute exists, and the RDFa attributes are being used in HTML which provides no default vocabulary.
The parser may consider the standard initial context too, and if it is a full RDFa parser it must. As the host language is HTML, the initial context is defined in [HTML5+RDFa Context]. At the present time this only includes mappings for describedBy, license and role. These are to be matched case-sensitively, or failing that case-insensitively, but the title term used in this example clearly does not match.
Regardless of whether the application considered the initial context, the title term cannot be resolved to an IRI and is therefore ignored.
If use of the initial context is changed to be required for CURIEs, below, it should be changed here too.
A CURIE comprises two components, a prefix and a reference, separated by a colon (U+003A). It matches the curie production given in §6 of [RDFa Core].
( '?' iquery )?  ( '#' ifragment )?
The definitions of NCName is found in [XML Names]. The various productions referenced in the definition of reference are defined in [RFC 3987]. None of these ipath productions match a string beginning "//", therefore IRIs of the form http://... never match the curie syntax production. There is a conflict with certain other, less-used IRI schemes, and mailto:user@example.com does match the syntax. However this only results in this IRI being treated as a CURIE if mailto is defined as a CURIE prefix. The RDFa working group considered the risk of this to be minimal.
Although this syntax definition allows the omission of both prefix and the colon, in practice there is no situation in RDFa where both can be omitted and the result still parsed as a CURIE. A parser conforming to this standard may safely treat the colon as mandatory.
When a datatype, property, rel, rev or typeof attribute contains a whitespace separated token that is syntactically a CURIE, the parser should look up its prefix to see whether a prefix mapping (which is an IRI) has been defined. This look-up is done case-insensitively.
This vocabulary contains little of use in marking up formatted citations.
When the prefix is present, a parser must try to look it up in the local prefix mappings. These are set using prefix attributes. This attribute must contain an even number of whitespace separated tokens: the first and every subsequent odd token must be an NCName followed by a colon; the second and every subsequent even token must be an IRI. The NCName is the prefix and the IRI is its prefix mapping. The mapping applies to the element where it is specified and to all elements in its content unless overridden.
The following is an example of a well-formed prefix attribute.
The prefix attribute on the <div> defines two local prefix mappings, one for the cev prefix, the other for the dc prefix. The dc local prefix mapping is overridden by the prefix attribute on the <i> element; the cev local prefix mapping has not been overridden and remains in operation.
The prefix consisting of a single underscore character (U+005F) has special meaning in §7.4.5 [RDFa Core] for referencing blank nodes. It must not be used in CURIEs other than for that purpose. Support for blank nodes is not recommended in this standard. Applications that do not support blank nodes must ignore CURIEs with a prefix consisting of a single underscore.
In determining the local prefix mappings, a parser may also use XML namespace declarations as defined in §7.5, item 3 of [RDFa Core]. This is not required even in full RDFa parsers and is deprecated; it is not recommended by this standard.
If the prefix was not found in the local prefix mappings, a parser may use an initial context as described in §9 of [RDFa Core] to determine the prefix mapping. When an initial context is used, it must be the standard one for the language on which the RDFa tags are used: implementations must not define their own initial context.
It may be worth making this required rather than optional as the initial context for HTML contains prefix mappings for several potentially useful vocabularies including Dublin Core and PROV. It is unlikely to add much complexity to the parser or this specification.
If a prefix mapping is found, the CURIE is converted to an IRI by prepending the prefix mapping to the reference part of the CURIE.
If no prefix mapping is found, the CURIE shall be treated as an IRI if it is syntactically valid as one or ignored otherwise. If this results in an IRI with an unknown scheme, the parser may ignore it; parsers must not ignore the http, https or urn schemes.
Virtually all CURIEs are syntactically valid IRIs since prefix:reference is a valid IRI, despite having an unknown scheme. The option of ignoring unknown IRI with unknown schemes is introduced because this standard makes the use of an initial context optional. CURIEs with prefixes that would be resolved via the initial context in a full RDFa parser may therefore be left unresolved by a parser conforming to this standard. Almost invariably they will have an unknown scheme when reinterpreted as an IRI and can therefore be dropped. Full RDFa parsers must use initial contexts and therefore must not ignore IRIs with unknown schemes.
If support for initial contexts becomes required, the ability to ignore unknown schemes should probably be dropped.
In general, a document will contain more than just a single citation element set, and parts of the document may also contain RDFa attributes for entirely different purposes; even if the only use of RDFa is for tagging citation elements it is important not to confuse the citation elements from one formatted citation or citation layer with those of another.
the property attribute is not located on a source-exclusion element (as defined in §3.2) within its associated source-type element, nor is it located on an element contained within a source-exclusion element within its associated source-type element.
The property attributes matching the above criteria shall be used to generate citation elements as described in §4. The set of citation elements generated from property attributes with a common associated source-type element shall form a citation element set, which represents a citation layer or a single-layered citation, as described in §5. The order of the citation elements in the citation element set shall be the order in which the property attribute from which they were generated appear in the document.
Alternatively an application using a full RDFa parser may identify citation element triples per §3.3 and parse them according to §4.5.
These definitions will likely need to be moved to [CEV Concepts].
HTML or XML content is only considered to be part of a formatted citation if it is a source-type element or is contained within one.
The typeof attribute of the <p> element has a value that expands to the required IRI. This marks the <p> element as a source-type element, and its contents as a formatted citation. This contains just one property attribute, so a parser will find just one citation element: an authorName one with value "Settipani".
The license property is not contained in a source-type element and therefore does not denote a citation element. It is a use of RDFa that is outside the scope of this standard. This is as well: Settipani's book is not licensed under a Creative Commons License, though a page discussing it may well be.
An external mechanism may be used to designate the entirety of an HTML document or fragment a source-type element.
A non-HTML syntax might embed fragments of HTML to represent individual formatted citations. It would likely designate each fragment to be a source-type element, in which case the typeof attribute is optional.
There has been some discussion about the possibility of using the resource attribute on source-type elements to generate certain "meta" citation elements such as a UUID or a "citation authority IRI".
The concept of a source-exclusion element is necessary to prevent a parser from misinterpreting property attributes that are part of more complex RDFa constructs which this standard does not require to be supported. Future FHISO standards may make use of some of these RDFa constructs and this restriction also allows for forwards compatibility.
An application that supports only those RDFa features for which support is required by this standard must consider an element to be a source-exclusion element of a given source-type element if it is contained within the source-type element (but is not the source-type element itself) and has an attribute named about, inlist, rel, resource, rev, or typeof.
The circumstances in which the source-type element is itself excluded needs further consideration giving particular attention to the processing sequence in §7.5 of [RDFa Core].
The following example includes a more complex use of RDFa attributes, beyond what this standard requires to be understood.
<i property="title">Les ancêtres de Charlemagne</i>.
The <p> element is a source-type element due to the typeof="CitedSource" attribute, and the formatted citation is the string "Settipani, Les ancêtres de Charlemagne."
The <p> element has one source-exclusion element: the outer <span> element due to its rel attribute. Parsers are not expected to understand the meaning of this rel attribute, just to note its presence. As the inner <span> element is contained within this source-exclusion element, the property="foaf:name" attribute must not be treated as a citation element.
The property attribute on the <i> element is not located within a source-exclusion element, and therefore it does denote a citation element. This is the only citation element in this example.
These rules allow source-type elements to nest, with the inner source-type element being a source-exclusion element of the outer source-type element. This behaviour is used in the representation of layered citations, as discussed in §5.
Applications which support a larger part of RDFa than this standard requires may treat fewer elements as source-exclusion elements. If so, they must ensure that RDFa constructs are only treated as citation elements when they produce a relevant RDF triples as defined in §3.3.
This standard is designed to allow implementers to parse the RDFa constructs that are used without having to consider how they map to RDF. Only implementers wishing to make greater use of the RDF features underlying RDFa than this standard requires need consider this.
This section is only relevant if an implementation wishes to make greater use of the RDF features that underlie RDFa. Support for everything in this section is therefore optional.
Instead of identifying source-type elements and source-exclusion elements, as specified in §3.1 and §3.2, applications supporting more RDFa features than this standard requires may parse the document in accordance with [RDFa Core] to generate a sequence of RDF triples which must be in the order in which §7.5 of [RDFa Core] states that they are produced.
The detailed specification in §7.5 of [RDFa Core] requires that property attributes are processed and used to generate RDF triples in document order. However the [RDFa Core] processing model requires these triples be added to an RDF graph, and RDFa graphs are not required to preserve the order of triples; nevertheless, most current RDFa processors do output properties in document order. Implementations using an RDFa parser to implement this specification must verify that the document order of properties can be determined.
This IRI is referred to as the rdf:type IRI, and such triples are referred to as rdf:type triples. They are used to state that the declared type of the subject of triple is the object of the triple.
If there is no triple stating the declared type of a particular entity, it has no declared type. An entity might have multiple declared types if an RDF graph has multiple rdf:type triples with the same subject and different objects.
Not all the RDF triples extracted from a document will necessarily correspond to citation elements. RDF triples that do represent a citation element are known as citation element triples. Applications shall determine which RDF triples are citation element triples as follows.
If the object of the RDF triple is an RDF blank node, the triple shall not be considered a citation element triple.
A future FHISO standard might extend this data model to include support for blank nodes, likely using them to represent objects with properties of their own, i.e. as a form of structured value.
An application may be able to determine this by discovery on the predicate IRI.
Otherwise, if the predicate of the RDF triple is the rdf:type IRI or is known to be a source derivation type defined, as defined in §5.1 of [CEV Concepts], the triple shall not be considered a citation element triple.
Otherwise, if the object of the RDF triple has a declared type which is or includes one of the following IRIs, the triple shall not be considered a citation element triple.
Such triples are excluded as they represent links between citation layers such as the layer derivation links defined in §5.1 of [CEV Concepts]. This rule is needed because application might not have recognised the source derivation type used.
Otherwise, if the subject of the RDF triple has a declared type which is or includes one of the following IRIs, the triple shall be considered a citation element triple.
Otherwise, if the application can infer the RDF type of the subject of the RDF triple to be one of the two previous IRIs, the triple should be considered a citation element triple.
The word "infer" is intended to be interpreted broadly, and includes inferences made through entailment regimes, as those defined in [RDF Semantics]. Support for any such inference mechanism is completely optional.
Otherwise, the RDF triple should be considered a citation element triple.
a citation element value, which shall be a localisation set.
Once an application has identified the property attributes that are representing citation element according to the process given in §3, it shall determine each component of each citation element as follows.
The citation element name shall be the value of the property attribute, once shorthand IRIs have been expanded. If the property attribute contains more than one IRI, each shall be used as the citation element name of a separate citation element with a copy of the same citation element value.
To construct the citation element value, an application shall determine its current property value, as defined in §4.2 below. This is a string and is used to construct a new localisation set to be the citation element value. The application shall then determine the datatype of the string per §4.3, and if the result is a language-tagged datatype, shall also determine its language tag per §4.4. Alternatively, applications that opt to parse RDFa to RDF triples, as a full RDFa parser does, may determine the current property value, datatype and language tag per §4.5.
These rules are illustrated by example in the sections below.
For the purpose of this section, the current element refers to the XML or HTML element that has the property attribute which tags the current citation element.
RDFa, as used in this standard, is a list-flattening format. This means it does not naturally provide a means of keeping the localisation sets of each citation element separate because it has no means of distinguishing multi-valued citation elements from translated or localised versions of the same citation element. Applications must therefore assume every property attribute identifies a separate citation element.
It would have been possible for this standard to have defined a usage of RDFa that was not a list-flattening format. This was not done because it would make most straightforward uses unidiomatic, and likely compromise the uptake of this standard.
The following RDFa markup is well-formed but will be misinterpreted by a parser conforming to this specification.
The Anglo-Japanese Treaty was (at least nominally) authored by two people: the Marquess of Lansdowne and Count Hayashi Tadasu whose name is written in kanji as 林 董. A conformant application will see three authorNames and make each into a separate citation element, when in fact the desired behaviour is for "林 董" to be part of the same localisation set as "Hayashi Tadasu".
Applications are required to use the localisedElement mechanism defined in §3.4.1 of [CEV Concepts] when multiple translations or localisations of a single citation element value are needed.
This use of the content attribute is discussed below. It provides a value for the citation element while hiding the value from an HTML renderer.
This section, together with the following section defining the datatype, derive from step 11 in the processing sequence given in §7.5 of [RDFa Core], as amended by §3.1 of [HTML+RDFa].
The current property value is a string which will be used to create the citation element value. It is determined based on the RDFa attributes present on the current element as follows.
The use of the term current property value in this standard coincides with its definition in [RDFa Core].
If current element has a content attribute, and either has no datatype attribute, or its datatype attribute is empty or has a value (after expanding shorthand IRIs) other than either of the following IRIs, then the current property value shall be the value of the content attribute.
These two IRIs have special treatment in RDFa. This standard excludes them for complete compatibility with a full RDFa parser, but it is not anticipated that they will arise in practice.
The purpose of the content attribute is to allow the citation element value to be something that is not rendered or otherwise used in HTML. This is particularly important when the citation element is required to have a value in a format that is different to how the element is formatted.
In this case, the use of a content attribute is necessary because the publicationDate citation element value must be a date in the prescribed date format based on [ISO 8601]: it must not be a date like "May 22nd, 2017".
It would be desirable to add support for the resource attribute here. Before adding it, it is necessary to establish how safe it is to remove resource from the list of attributes that make a source-exclusion element.
Otherwise, if the host language is HTML, if the current element has a datetime attribute, the current property value shall be the value of the datetime attribute.
Otherwise, in HTML or in other XML languages that support an href attribute, if the current element has an href attribute and no datatype attribute, the current property value shall be the value of the href attribute, which shall be an IRI.
Otherwise, in HTML or in other XML languages that support a src attribute, if the current element has a src attribute and no datatype attribute, the current property value shall be the value of the src attribute, which shall be an IRI.
The [HTML+RDFa] standard does not change which HTML elements can have a datetime, href or src attribute. At present, the datetime attribute is only permitted on a <time> element; most href attributes in HTML are found on <a> elements; most src attributes are on elements that display some form of media, particularly <img> and in HTML5, <video> and <audio>.
When an href or src attribute links to an online source, it can be tagged as a citation element.
The fact that the second property attribute is on a child element of the element containing the first property attribute is irrelevant and does not signify any additional connection between the title and the accessURL over and above their usual relationship.
Otherwise, the current property value shall be formed by concatenating the text contained in each of the descendant text nodes of the current element in document order.
This definition allows citation elements to nest which can be useful when tagging full titles and short versions of them.
The shortTitle property takes the value "The visitations of Kent", while the title property takes the value "The visitations of Kent, taken in the years ..." by concatenating the text in the nested <span> element with the text directly in the <i> element.
A conformant parser must determine the datatype which tags the string in the citation element value as follows.
If the current element has a non-empty datatype attribute, then the datatype shall be the value of datatype attribute once shorthand IRIs have been expanded. The datatype attribute must not contain the name of a language-tagged datatype or the name of an abstract datatype. The use of a datatype attribute is recommended for citation elements that are not well-known if the datatype is known not to be one that is prohibited in a datatype attribute.
By using a datatype attribute, the RDFa author is ensuring the application processing the data knows the citation element is a date and will display it to the user appropriately, even if it does not know exactly what the date signifies.
Language-tagged datatypes must not be placed in a datatype attribute because the RDFa parsing rules mean the language tag is discarded if a datatype attribute is found.
This rule exists for compatibility with a full HTML+RDFa parser where this behaviour is required; implementation of this rule is otherwise not recommended. Document authors should not rely on this behaviour, and should instead add a datatype attribute.
An application that implements this rule would read the markup below and generate a citation element value whose single string "2000-10-08" would be tagged with the xsd:date datatype.
This differs from the behaviour specified in [RFDa Core]. An application using a full RDFa parser will parse this as an RDF IRI and then apply this datatype per §4.5.
This is so that the current language tag is not lost, as it would be if the default were a string.
and tag the string with a language tag of und.
Applications may opt to apply datatype correction while parsing RDFa for citation elements; if so, these datatypes will often be replaced by the default datatype of the citation element term.
The language tag of the citation element shall be the value of xml:lang or lang attribute on the current element, failing which on the nearest ancestor element of the current element. If both attributes are present on the same element, the xml:lang attribute takes precedence.
This standard does not change when the xml:lang and lang attributes may be used on an HTML element. In particular, the xml:lang attribute is only allowed in XHTML documents.
This formatted citation is correctly tagged with the language tag en denoting English. This is because, even though the book's title is French, the citation as a whole is in English. Had the citation been written in French, the edition would have been written "2ᵉ éd" rather than "2nd ed".
This example contains three citation elements. The authorName and edition citation elements both inherit the en language tag. In the case of authorName this may or may not be what was intended: the author is French but his name would not normally be altered in translation to English. The explicit language tag is necessary on the title citation element, as the title is clearly French.
If no applicable xml:lang or lang, an external mechanism may be used to supply the language tag.
In a document fetched via HTTP, a Content-Language header may provide the default language tag for the whole document.
If the formatted citation is a fragment of XHTML in a different XML language, the value of any xml:lang attributes in the host XML will be inherited by the XHTML as defined in §2.12 of [XML].
When these attributes are used in host languages other than HTML, the definition of the host language may provide a default language tag that applies in the event that no such attribute is found.
FHISO does not recommend the use of a default language tag when it gives privileged status to one language. If technical considerations require a default language tag, a neutral language tag such as und (defined in [ISO 639-2] to represent an undetermined language) should be used.
If no applicable xml:lang or lang attribute was found, no value was supplied through an external mechanism and no default applies, or if provided language tag is an empty string, the citation element has no language tag.
Applications supporting more RDFa features than required by this standard may determine the current element value, its datatype and, where applicable, its language tag from the object of a citation element triple that was identified per §3.3 of this standard.
If the object of the RDF triple is a literal, then the current element value shall be the lexical form of the literal, as defined in §3.3 of [RDF Concepts]. Its datatype shall be the datatype IRI of the literal, and its language tag shall be the language tag of the literal if that is present exists.
The object of the RDF cannot be a blank node as RDF triples whose objects are blank nodes are discarded in §3.2.
Once the citation elements in a document have been located, parsed and grouped into citation element sets, the application shall interpret each citation element set as a citation layer.
a set of layer derivation links.
In these RDFa bindings, citation layers are represented by a source-type element which are nested in layered citations.
has an attribute named rev or rel (or has both), but does not also have an attribute named about, href, inlist, resource or src.
The citation layer represented by a nested source-type element shall be part of the same layered citation as the citation layer represented by its outer source-type element. Source-type elements may be nested arbitrarily deep, and multiple nested source-type elements may be present within the same outer source-type element: they all represent citation layers which are part of the same layered citation.
The following fragment of HTML represents a layered citation with three citation layers.
The second <span> element is a source-type element by virtue of its typeof attribute, which also makes it a source-exclusion element of the <p> element. It has a rel attribute, and together these facts make it a nested source-type element. The <p> element is its outer source-type element. Exactly the same applies to the third <span> element, and as both are part of the same layered citation as their shared outer source-type element, both must be in the same layered citation as each other.
As the second and third <span> elements are source-exclusion elements of the outer source-type element, their title property is only a citation element of the nested source-type elements, and not also of the outer source-type element. The outer source-type element therefore only has one citation element: the authorName.
All but one of the source-type elements in a layered citation will be nested source-type elements. The one that is not is known as the outermost source-type element.
The collection of citation layers in a layered citation is an ordered list, and the citation layers should be include given in document order.
If precisely one such element exists in the layered citation, the head citation layer shall be the citation element represented by that element; otherwise the head citation layer shall be the citation element represented by the outermost source-type element. There shall not be more than one source-type elements in a layered citation with a typeof attribute whose value includes this IRIs.
The head citation layer is defined in [CEV Concepts] as the citation layer representing the source that was actually consulted, but this need not be presented first in a formatted citation. More generally, this suite of standard makes no recommendation on how citation layers should be ordered within a formatted citation. Different style guides make different recommendations, and the decision may depend on the precise circumstances and what the author wishes to emphasise. The CitedSource type is provided to facilitate the correct identification of the head citation layer, regardless of where it is placed.
Individual citation elements have not been tagged in this example for reasons of brevity.
In this second version, there is no need to use the CitedSource type as it defaults to the outermost source-type element.
In this standard, layer derivation links are represented by rel and rev attributes on nested source-type elements.
Once shorthand IRIs have been expanded, each IRI in the rel and rev attributes shall be used as the source derivation type of a new layer derivation link. If the IRI was in a rel attribute, the derived source shall be the source represented by the outer source-type element, and the base source shall be the source represented by the nested source-type element. If the IRI was in a rev attribute, the derived source shall be the source represented by the nested source-type element, and the base source shall be the source represented by the outer source-type element.
The rel and rev attributes provide forwards and reverse versions of the same functionality: the difference being that the rel attribute is placed on the base source, while the rev attribute is placed on the derived source.
In the previous example, the microfilm is derived from the 1810 census returns. The first version needs to use a rev attribute because the nested source-type element is the derived source, while the second version uses a rel attribute because the nested source-type element is the base source.
This representation of layer derivation links does not allow an arbitrary set of layer derivation links to be encoded as there is no way to reference a citation layer that is encoded elsewhere, but it does cope with any tree of derivations which is the case that is anticipated to arise in practice. Applications supporting more RDFa functionality than this standard requires can express arbitrary collections of layer derivation links, and an example of this is given in §5.4.
The above restriction is to prevent a full RDFa parser from disagreeing with an application just implementing this standard over the identity of the head citation layer. The term "inferred" is meant broadly, and includes inferences made through entailment regimes, as defined in [RDF Semantics].
Applications may utilise the fact that https://terms.fhiso.org/sources/CitedSource is an RDF subclass of https://terms.fhiso.org/sources/Source.
The subject of the RDF triple corresponds to derived source and its object is the base source; the predicate is the source derivation type. Such triples should not also be used to generate a citation element as would otherwise be permitted by §3.2.
In the following example, the layers have been shorted to just contain placeholder text for brevity.
An application conforming only to this standard will parse this and find three citation layers, and two layer derivation links saying that A is derived from both B and C. The resource attribute on the first <i> element will be ignored, and the <span> element is a source-exclusion element and so will also be ignored.
However a full RDFa parser will find three derivedFrom triples. In addition to the triples saying A is derived from B and C, there is a third triple saying that C is derived from B. An application may use this information to generate a third layer derivation link.
This arrangement of three layer derivation links is an example that cannot be represented in the subset of RDFa that this standard requires to be supported.
When an application has both a formatted citation tagged with RDFa attributes per this standard and a citation element set for the same citation, the two will typically have much content in common. This introduces the possibility that the data in the two places becomes unsynchronised. This section discusses ways of avoiding this.
In general, applications should consider information from the citation element set to have precedence over information extracted from a formatted citation.
If an application allows the manual editing of formatted citations tagged with RDFa attributes per this standard, it should take steps to prevent this from changing the citation element values that a conformant application would extract from the formatted citation to be different from the citation element values in the citation element set.
This document does not prescribe a particular mechanism for ensuring this, but most strategies will involve parse the RDFa attributes before and after the edit and identify any citation elements whose values have changed. An application might ask the user whether the change should be propagated back to the original citation element set. If the change is not to be propagated back to the citation element set, the application might delete the property attribute so the changed data is no longer recognised as a citation element, or insert a content attribute containing the correct data per §4.2.
Suppose an application generates the following formatted citation.
If an application stores formatted citations tagged with RDFa attributes as per this standard, it should take steps to ensure that changes to the underlying citation element set propagate to the formatted citation.
An application doing this would parse the formatted citation per this standard, locate the part of the HTML or XML that contains the old citation element value and overwrite it with the new value. For citation elements that are multi-valued elements, the application needs to know both the old and the new citation element value so that it knows which value is being updated; for other elements it is not necessary to know the old value.
This example gives a full HTML document of the sort a genealogist might publish online. In a paragraph of narrative text it gives some brief details of King Edward II's birth and parents. Although brief, this information is properly sourced to three published books with the citations formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Each of these formatted citations has been marked up with RDFa attributes as described in this standard. The document includes several other instances of RDFa attributes that will not be detected as citation elements by a compliant parser.
<span property="page" content="33, 36">33 &amp; 36</span>.
FHISO (Family History Information Standards Organisation). *Citation Elements: General Concepts". Third public draft. See https://fhiso.org/TR/cev-concepts.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax. W3C Recommendation, 2014. See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). RDFa Core 1.1. W3C Recommendation, 3rd ed., 2015. See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core.
IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). RFC 2119: Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. BCP 14. Scott Bradner, 1997. See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition). W3C Recommendation, 26 Nov 2008. See https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/.
FHISO (Family History Information Standards Organisation). *Citation Elements: Bindings for ELF". Exploratory draft.
FHISO (Family History Information Standards Organisation). *Citation Elements: Bindings for GEDCOM X". Exploratory draft.
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Dublin Core metadata element set. Dublin Core recommendation, version 1.1, 1999. See http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/.
Elizabeth Shown Mills. Evidence Explained, 2nd ed. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2009.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). HTML+RDFa 1.1. W3C Recommendation, 2nd ed., 2015. See http://www.w3.org/TR/html-rdfa.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). HTML5+RDFa Initial Context. Last updated 9 Dec 2011. See http://www.w3.org/2011/rdfa-context/html-rdfa-1.1.
ISO (International Organization for Standardization). ISO 8601:2004. Data elements and interchange formats — Information interchange — Representation of dates and times. 2004.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). RDF Schema 1.1. W3C Recommendation, 2014. See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). RDF 1.1 Semantics. W3C Recommendation, 2014. See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-mt.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). RDFa 1.1 Primer. W3C Recommendation, 3rd ed., 2015. See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-primer.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). XHTML+RDFa 1.1. W3C Recommendation, 3rd ed., 2015. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa.
W3 (World Wide Web Consortium). Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Third Edition). W3C Recommendation, 8 Dec 2009. See https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/.
Copyright © 2017–18, Family History Information Standards Organisation, Inc. The text of this standard is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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