[tei-council] regularizing names

[Julia Flanders]

John, thanks! Just in case it wasn't clear, we do envision having the 
option of pointing to an external file (whether locally maintained or 
maintained somewhere else). Our suggestion was that this pointing happen 
from the <regName> element--in other words, you always point from <name> 
(<persName>, etc.) to <regName>, and then the <regName> either tells you 
what you want to know or points you outward via its url= attribute. It 
could even do both.

I think you're right that this overlaps conceptually with key=, and I 
pondered this a bit yesterday. It seems to me that the distinction 
between key= and reg= is still that key= is a way of taking you to 
information about a person, and reg= is a way of providing (or taking 
you to) information about a name. In the situations Perry is 
envisioning, where name authority records are the source of information 
about the name, they also happen to provide that information by 
providing information about a person. But this is incidental, and might 
not always be the case.

I also think your idea about where <regName> might live seems 
reasonable. I assume that if we do develop a new prosopographic module, 
it will live in <profileDesc> and this could be incorporated thereunto.

Best, Julia

John A. Walsh wrote:

>Julia and Perry,
>
>This seems to me to be a very elegant solution. 
>
>I'm wondering where in the header these <regName> elements should live.  It
>seems that <profileDesc> is the logical place, since it groups together lots of
>other non-bibliographic metadata.  <profileDesc> could include a
><regularization> (or <regularisation>) element that groups together the many
><regName> elements.
>
>And perhaps the guidelines should also discuss the option of pointing to an
>external file dedicated to name regularizations.  For instance, if my project
>consists of hundreds of commentaries on Romantic poetry, I don't need to repeat
><regName authority="LCNAF" id="byron" >Byron, George Gordon Byron,
>Baron</regName> in every document.  Rather, I could do something like this:
>"...the dastardly and poisonous malignity of <persName
>reg="myRegNames.xml#byron">Byron's</persName> most foul and treacherous
>libel...," pointing to a master myRegNames.xml file.  Of course, this latter
>approach has some potential overlap with the functionality of @key, if one
>accepts that the key can be an id in an XML file as well as it could be a id in
>a database.  But then the TEI is all about choices :-), so I don't see this as a
>problem.
>
>John
>  
>