[tei-council] @key and @ref: recap ok?

Sun Jun 10 09:09:41 EDT 2007

About a month ago on this list we had some discussion about the 
attributes used to associate a name with its referent, i.e. how do you 
say that "Bill Sniggsw" in the text is actually the same person as "Wm 
Sniggeswort" and indeed was a carpenter born in 1602; or (mutatis 
mutandis) how do you say that "Shipton" in your source is actually the 
place located at lat/long 14.2 13.2  and formerly known as "Brycgstow".

As I work on integrating placeography outcomes into the chapter that 
treats these matters, I have found it helpful to briefly summarize the 
various linking attributes concerned once for all. This duplicates some 
matter presented elsewhere in the Guidelines, but it seemed convenient 
to recap it in this context.

I'd be very grateful if you could read it through (it's only a few 
paras) and confirm (or deny) that it expresses the consensus we reached 
earlier reasonably well.

-------------------------------------

<div><head>Linking names and their referents</head>

<p>As members of the <ident type="class">att.naming</ident> class,
many of the elements described in this chapter share the following 
attributes:
<specList><specDesc key="att.naming" atts="key nymRef ref"/></specList>
These attributes are designed to support two different ways of
associating a name, of any kind, with its referent. The encoder may
use either, neither, or both in combination as appropriate. The
<att>ref</att> attribute should be used wherever it is possible to supply
a direct link such as a URI to indicate the location of canonical
information about the referent. For example:
<egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples">That silly man
<name ref="#DPB1" type="person">David Paul Brown</name> has suffered 
...</egXML>
This encoding requires that there exist somewhere in the same document
a <gi>person</gi> element with the identifier <code>DBP1</code>, which
will contain canonical information about this particular person,
marked up using the elements discussed in <ptr target="#NDPERS"/>
below. The same element might alternatively be provided by some other 
document,
of course, which the same attribute could refer to by means of a URI,
as  explained in <ptr target="#SAXP"/>:
<egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples">That silly man
<name ref="http://www.example.com/personography.xml#DPB1"
      type="person">David Paul Brown</name> has suffered
...</egXML></p>
<p>The <att>key</att> attribute is provided for cases where no such
direct link is required: for example because resolution of the reference is
carried out by some local convention, or because the encoder judges
that no such resolution is necessary. As an example of the first case,
a project might maintain its own local database system
containing canonical information about persons and places, each entry
in which is accessed by means of some system-specific identifier
constructed in a project-specific way from the value supplied for the
<att>key</att> attribute. <note place="foot">In the module described by
chapter <ptr target="#TD"/> a similar method is used to link element
descriptions to the modules or classes to which they belong, for
example.</note> As an example of the second case, consider the use of
well-established codifications such as country or airport codes, which
it is probably  unnecessary for an encoder to expand further:
<egXML xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples">
I never fly from <name key="LHR" type="place">Heathrow Airport</name>
to <name key="FR" type="place">France</name></egXML>
</p>
</div>