OHOC2 FTW

Underlying the CTS URN notation is the abstract model of textual structure abbreviated as OHCO2.

The generality of this model is nicely illustrated by recent implementations of the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol.  The CTS protocol provides retrieval of texts by CTS URN:  implementations linked from this page use XML tree structures, relational databases and directed graph stores to store and retrieve texts.

For an essential scholarly concept (identifying a citable passage of text), that's a powerful level of abstraction permitting scholars and developers to select technologies best suited to the specific kind of work they want to pursue with a citable corpus.