Dear Patrick,
I completely agree with that. That's actually what I will try to do in my presentation: develop a conceptual model for the description of charters (as a prerequisite for future portal building and interoperability of data). To keep things simple I will concentrate on the Metadata-Level - but that will be already quite complex.
We really need a consensus on what our "object" is and how it can be described. If we have that, then we can try to derive from that a wider model of all the aspects of charters we wish to document or to encode. And if we have that wider model, we can start to think about element names, attribute names and values.
In my basic model I will regard (implicitly) the underlying concepts of at least the TEI-Header, the Dublin Core Abstract Model and FRBR, although none of these will completely fill the bill.
Are there any further suggestions as to which other conceptual approaches I may take into account?
I know you are aware of it - but I have to stress a bit on another model that we definitively have to take into account: The Vocabulaire internationale de diplomatique. TEI, DC and FRBR (i.e.: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) are models for printed material (FRBR), generic texts (TEI) and documents (DC) - and we are scholars of diplomatics (employed in archives, universities, libraries). We can learn from them - but we do need something that comes from our understanding what charters are ("historical texts with at least one physical representation on which its legal validity was based" - can anybody native speaking help me with this definition? :-). And you see: all three models you cited aren't really interested in the authenticity of a document. A scholar of diplomatics is ("discrimen veri ac falsi" ...). Thus also the models Luciana is talking of (MoReq e.g.) are of interest, I think. All the best Georg -- ------------------------------------- Dr.Georg Vogeler Historisches Seminar - Abt. Geschichtliche Hilfswissenschaften Ludwig-Maximilians-Universtitaet Muenchen e-mail: g.vogeler@lrz.uni-muenchen.de Internet: http://www.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/ghw/personen_vogeler.shtml