Changes to ELAN schema

[henrinie]

@vanlummelhuizen I noticed that your name appears in ELANs XML schema, so I will direct this question to you before asking Han, in case you have some ideas about this. I am not an expert in XML.

<xsd:attribute name="CV_ID" type="xsd:string" use="required"/>
<!-- <xsd:attribute name="DESCRIPTION" type="xsd:string" use="optional"/> -->
<xsd:attribute name="EXT_REF" type="xsd:IDREF" use="optional">

Do you know if it could it be possible to add attribute name="CV_NAME" and use that to show the name of the CV/ECV in ELAN? Currently ELAN seems to use this CV_ID value as the name of the CV.

This would allow one to change the name of the CV, and still have an unique ID for the CV. I ran into this problem with exporting the ECV from Signbank: We have used the dataset.name as the ID for the CV, but I am afraid that some day some user might change the name (and there might be some need to change it). So I decided to start using dataset.id as the ID ( #192 ). But ELAN shows this ID as the name of the CV, making it not very human-readable (eg. signbank-dataset-1).

[vanlummelhuizen]

My XML is a bit rusty, but I think it would take changing the XML Schemas for both EAF and (E)CV, and changing ELAN to cope with these changes. All in all, it would take some development and of course Han's approval.

I do think it is a good idea to separate ID, which would be (kind of) immutable, and NAME, which would mutable. I would back you if you would make your case with Han.

[henrinie]

There was an update regarding this issue back in May, so it was a while ago. I will add Han's comments here to keep this issue updated.

Dear Henri,

Yes, it is clear that this is a 'sub-optimal' situation and this is a known issue. The same goes, maybe even more, for elements like TIER, LINGUISTIC_TYPE etc.
Changing this would require many changes in the code of ELAN (as already mentioned in your Signbank discussion) and would break backward compatibility in a quite serious way. And though it is not always possible to avoid this, we have been fairly conservative in these matters, so far.

So, it was and is on the wishlist but I don't expect such changes implemented anywhere soon.

Best wishes,

Han Sloetjes
Software developer

So it seems that this won't be happening in the near future.