[tei-council] the "key" attribute

[Arianna Ciula]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Arianna Ciula wrote:
>> I think this is quite a complex issue to tackle since the use of 
>> implicit @key to refer to something else implies some sort of 
>> user-defined method to transform it into a real reference but at the 
>> same time requires the guidelines to be more explicit in suggested 
>> practices (e.g. use the TEI header, store your more explicit paths 
>> somewhere, create a TEI authority list of people/places).
> you mean that in general show people better how to use @ref instead of 
> @key?

I think the use of @key for persons/places is shown (inconsistently as 
you have also pointed out) but without prose on concrete practices. If I 
remember well the examples show the use of @key as a pointer to a person 
element, for instance, in the header. Now, we know this is a practice 
that work for relative small scenarios. Every project with a good amount 
of data on persons need a different way (TEI authority file containing 
only person elements for instance, prosopographical DB etc.) to store 
this information and recall it (need a better word than 'recall' here) 
from each single document through @keys.

>> i.e. for references that don't have necessarily the format of a 
>> pointer....but more to be done on the names and dates chapter to show 
>> how @key can be REALLY used.
> can you expand? in general, we discourage use of @key, don't we?

I am not sure we should discourage the use of an attribute that allows 
people to integrate data coming from different resources (e.g. XML 
source documents separate from DB material, ontology or whatever).
I am also a fan of @keys.
The XML source file cannot contain ALL the information about its context 
(e.g. prosopographical context) and shouldn't (IMO).
However, I do agree that we could suggest better ways of doing things 
such as what we are now doing by supporting the use of namespaces: for 
instance, tell where you could store store the path to get to your DB 
and transform those keys into actual references and so on.

Hope I wasn't too confusing...really busy week.

Arianna
-- 
Dr Arianna Ciula
Research Associate
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS (UK)
Tel: +44 (0)20 78481945
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cch