As an IPC, I would like to express (and as I an LCH, I would like to view) the total set of books planned for any given publication in metadata 2.1.1

[ericpyle]

Currently publications/publication/structure/content/@src is required in metadata 2.1.

I would guess that we should relax that @src requirement if there's a need to allow owners to express (and LCH's to see) the plans for incremental content/revisions. It's not clear to me whether publication/canonicalContent should also capture the "goal" or simply the books that exist in the manifest that are linked to by @src

[mvahowe]

@ericpyle The metadata describes what is there, not what might one day be there, and I think it needs to stay that way. With publications we can now describe exactly what is in various editions of an entry without requiring that list to correspond to a "canon". I think that the way to describe intent in 2.1 would be using the rather broader "scope" categories. And we might wish to extend the options in that category.

[mvahowe]

Also, at an entry level, "the total set of books" is a somewhat slippery notion given that a LCH may not be able to use all publications, which may mean that the total set of books they can see is not the total set of books that have or might ever been translated. It was for reasons like this that YV decided to ignore the scope values as essentially useless for their purposes. That means IPCs can use that field for vapourware without causing (more) confusion for LCHs.

[mvahowe]

The only issue with this is if/when someone decides to aggregate scope values across entries to tell the world how many New Testaments we have, even if half the New Testaments only contain 3 verses of PHM.

[ericpyle]

@mvahowe wrote:

...I think that the way to describe intent in 2.1 would be using the rather broader "scope" categories. And we might wish to extend the options in that category.

I suppose publication/canonSpec could be used as well as identification/scope (and identification/canonSpec)? Though obviously if no content has been produced for an old testament only publication, that wouldn't show up listed as a publication until at least some content was ready

[mvahowe]

Maybe, but the problem with all such suggestions is that the metadata has to make sense for both IPCs (who, from what you say, might wish to express intent) and LCHs (for whom non-existent text is not very interesting at all). And all this then needs to be automagically tweaked on the server according to the licence, which raises interesting questions such as why we would hide metadata about books that do exist from some LCHs but tell them about books that don't exist.

Intention to translate sounds to me like a project management kind of thing, and I wonder if that belongs in the entry metadata file at all. (A similar argument could be made for progress information.) Maybe we need another place to handle this kind of information?