Ancillary services suppporting scholarly reference

Scholarly references depend on conventional identifiers that other scholars will recognize. In traditional print practice, these conventions are often ambiguous or imprecise; for systematic processing in a network service, we must define explicit and unambiguous conventions. The following ancillary services and standards address parts of this problem.

Registry Services

Registry Services provide a way to lookup standard identifiers, such as the identifiers used to refer to text groups and works in the CTS protocol. Registry Services are similar to other name lookup services, but with two unusual features:

  1. the Registry services protocol permits a hierarchical organization of objects. (Among other things, this allows a Registry Service to represent the hierarchical model of a text used in the CTS protocol).
  2. the Registry services protocol requires all entries in a registry to be documented with an attestation. Registries are therefore never hypothetical lists of values, but always represent values for objects found and attested somewhere.

(See more information.)

CTS URNs

URNs are an IETF standard for referring to persistent resources, independent of any location. (For example, there is a URN standard for ISBNs to identify editions of books, independent of any reference to where actual copies exist.)

The CTS URN project is developing a formal proposal for submission to the IETF, defining the semantics and a URN syntax for references to classical texts. This notation expresses the CTS notions of work and of citation in a single character string that can easily be used by any application wishing to refer to persistent text resources.

CTS URNs can point to units as small as one character in a document's native character set. Version 1.2 of the CTS protocol directly supports requests expressed in CTS URN notation.

(See more information.)

Language and script encoding standards

No current standard for encoding digital documents fully and explicitly represents all the information classicists need to capture about language, writing system and how they are encoded digitally. At CHS, we are helping develop proposals for wider discussion, suggesting ways to address this problem.

(See more information.)

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