Fwd: [pretext-support] Exercise metadata

[Matthew Leingang]

Hi folks,

Rob suggested we move this discussion to dev.

Can you say more about the reason for calling the element #provenance? That would seem to exclude subject-type metadata.

Best,

Matthew

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: 'Rob Beezer' via PreTeXt support <pretext...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [pretext-support] Exercise metadata
To: <pretext...@googlegroups.com>

Dear Matthew,

I like where you are going here.  Through the years, we have consciously tried
not to get bogged down with all the intracacies of quality metadata (along with
not getting bogged down with new syntax for mathematics).  Oscar has done a nice
job of reforming document-level stuff with #bibinfo.  And maybe it is time to
think more carefully about the ideas you propose.

Alex J suggests that WeBWorK problemes as bare PG code will just be brought
on-board by authors from somewhere else.  David F suggests we record that
origin.  There are other places where we might record the provenance of some
material, such as a TikZ diagram "borrowed" from "somewhere else."

Could we agree on a #provenace metadata-ish container, for #exercise and other
elements (e.g. STACK exercises)?  Maybe populated with a subset of Dublin Core
(DC) items so we don't have to think about designing it (and we get a namespace
for free)?

exercise
   title
   provenance
     dc:date
     dc:creator
     ...

I know this does not cover your entire use case.  But it is more broadly
applicable for us than just a collection of exercises.  Maybe a second container
just for exercises, describing their topic coverage, difficulty, etc.

Since you do not plan (yet!) to do anything with these, we can just explicitly
kill them in "pretext-common.xsl" so they never bleed through to output.  This
is already standard practice for #title since it gets used lots of places in
different ways and different forms (ToC, file names, etc).  I could see a nice
exercise in making a friendly catalog of your exercises by mining and presenting
the metadata (reducing the strain of doing visual scans).

Mitch is right about attributes and DC is right about elements.  My rule of
thumb for PreTeXt is that what a reader sees goes in elements and what is a
property or behavior-modifier or enumerated token belongs in an attribute.  We
routinely stuff several items in an attribute (space- or comma- delimited).  I
just saw a DC example stuff a bunch of keywords (or topics) into one element,
separated by spaces.  (Not sure I would *ever* do that.)  Not sure DC buys us a
whole lot, but maybe it can't hurt, and the namespace will avoid some confusion
(e.g. #theorem already has a #creator child).

Once you capture stuff as XML it is pretty easy to write transforms that morph
it into other forms of XML, so you could have some freedom to experiment, so
long as use does not spread too far.

Short answer: two new metadata containers, #provenance and #????, to be killed
on-sight, and ill-defined as to children?

Maybe discussion could/should move to "pretext-dev"?  @Matthew - you could
request a membership to that group?

Rob

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Matthew Leingang (he/his)
Clinical Professor of Mathematics
Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies

Department of Mathematics
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University

212.998.3107

Schedule an appointment with me at https://calendly.com/leingang

[Rob Beezer]

On 8/15/25 10:34, Matthew Leingang wrote:
> Can you say more about the reason for calling the element #provenance? That
> would seem to exclude subject-type metadata.

> I know this does not cover your entire use case. But it is more broadly
> applicable for us than just a collection of exercises. Maybe a second container
> just for exercises, describing their topic coverage, difficulty, etc.

TWO containers. one for general use, beyond your request, but also part of it.

A second container, with name ????? that services what #exercise need (and
#image don't and what #datafile don't, etc.)

#provenance *exactly* describes the general container...

Rob