dita — archive

[Bruce Nevin]

Rather than "a presentation" of "the" metamodel, this should be understood, I think, as opening a line of metamodel discussion by the TC as a necessary big-picture context for 1.3 and 2.0. I don't think Rob can appropriately be asked to pack all of that into a 45-minute slideshow plus discussion, nor would it be fair to the subject, less to our need to grapple with the issues. Rob has done impressive work on the grammar of content at that scale and scope, which is easiest to understand as a proposed solution; grasping it as a delineation of the problem space requires more time and attention on our part. That word 'grammar' may help make the point. Many people have done work on the grammar of English. When we talk about the Grammar of English on Historical Principles by Otto Jespersen, or the Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles by Zellig Harris, these are descriptions of or formulations of something antecedent, called the grammar of English. Just so, our task is not to talk about "the" metamodel by Rob Hanna, but rather to take responsibility for the structural and semantic properties of narrative documents, of which Rob's metamodel is a description or formulation. /B >