Copyright © 2021 Mulberry Technologies, Inc.
Abstract
Customizing a tag set can be an easy way to get the vocabulary you need. It can also be a a journey filled with dead ends, trap doors, and slowly-revealed and difficult to identify problems. Like many public tag sets, JATS (the Journal Article Tag Suite) was designed to be customized. Our original expectation was that individual users would customize it, and while a few have done that to good effect, we have found that the major customizations have been by groups of users. BITS (the Book Interchange Tag Suite), NISO STS (Standards Tag Suite), and Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) are widely adopted customizations of JATS.
When users customize a tag set they expect to be able to use the existing infrastructure associated with that tag set, making changes to accommodate the changes they made. They often expect to intermingle their new documents with documents tagged to the original tag set and perhaps with documents tagged to other customizations of the source tag set. They expect this to work gracefully, easily, seamlessly. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it does not!
The “JATS Compatibility Meta-Model Description” was developed to help people who customize JATS create tag sets to create models that will coexist peacefully with existing JATS documents and with documents tagged to other JATS customizations.
It seems unlikely that the particulars of the JATS Compatibility Model will apply to other tag sets, but the principles behind the Meta-Model might be useful to other groups thinking about ways to make their families of tag sets flexible and compatible.
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