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

Sun Jun 10 17:50:52 EDT 2007

Seems fine to me, though I don't like unresolvable keys, even for
airports.

On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 14:09 +0100, Lou's Laptop wrote:
> 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>
> 
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-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Department Chair and Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/

Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
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Email: daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
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