[Treebase-devel] labels and titles and descriptions, oh my!

[Rutger V. <rut...@gm...>]

Hi,

Val, MJD and I just had a meeting where we tried to reconstruct the
origins and meaning of the different metadata text strings attached to
treebase objects: tree.label, tree.title, matrix.title,
matrix.description. I theorized the following, and am now looking for
confirmation from Bill (this is all in the context of identifying
fields that clients may search on through the web interface):

* tree.label => this is the token captured thusly from a nexus tree
description: /U?TREE\s+(.\S+?)\s*=/, i.e. a token that is always
present in all nexus versions, but it's short and needs to be
nexus-safe (w.r.t. quotes, spaces, comments)

* tree.title => entered by users in the TreeBASE1 (and 2) interface,
not parsed or serialized to/from nexus. (The TITLE token that occurs
in mesquite-nexus is optional and in any case applies to the enclosing
block.)

* matrix.title => analogous to tree.title, i.e. entered by users. It's
not the TITLE token from characters blocks (again, that's a
mesquite-ism; we could use that as a default value during the initial
upload, but in general it's user supplied)

* matrix.description => a longer, user-supplied description that
wasn't used in TreeBASE1, hence we've populated it with the legacy
identifiers.

The reason this question comes up is that we're trying to sketch out a
small controlled vocabulary of search keys (the actual key strings to
be matched to CDAO, DC and others (perhaps including an ontology of
TB2-specific subclasses of CDAO terms)). We probably don't expect
clients to know the difference between label, title and description so
we might lump them into a more generic "description" key that is
matched against all of them.

Rutger

-- 
Dr. Rutger A. Vos
Department of zoology
University of British Columbia
http://www.nexml.org
http://rutgervos.blogspot.com