With his permission, I forward some interesting comments on the new
"personography" proposals which just arrived from Richard Light, a long
time friend of the TEI.
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In message <[log in to unmask]>, Lou
Burnard <[log in to unmask]> writes
>It occurs to me that if you have time to take a look at the new section
>in P5 about personal biographies
>(http://www.tei-c.org/P5/Guidelines/ND.html#NDPERS) you may find that
>of some interest to cidoc folks. It's an attempt to represent real
>things, rather than text, for a change.
Yes, "Names and Dates" does seem to have come along since the P3 days.
It appears to be heading in the same direction as our 1990s CIMI work
(Project CHIO), trying to enable the encoding of assertions, found "in
place" within texts, about real-world people, places and events.
One challenge in playing this game, as I'm sure you are aware, is that
the nature of such assertions within prose doesn't necessarily lend
itself to neat hierarchical packaging. The <persEvent> example in
20.4.2.3 is nicely structured, but not all assertions that A was married
to B on a certain date at a given place will be so well-behaved. To
take two obvious cases: they could span two paragraphs; or they could
contain extraneous text which would perforce have to fall, misleadingly,
within the <persEvent> element. I have felt for a long time that
stand-off markup is a useful tool in this situation: it allows you to
point precisely and unambiguously to the components of an assertion,
however the author chose to phrase it. However, in well-behaved cases
like your example (i.e. DNB-like biographical resources) it would be a
total pain to have to use stand-off markup, so it should be an optional
alternative technique.
I see the tendency in P5 is towards rather specific person-oriented
concepts (e.g. affiliation, floruit, persEvent), and would question the
wisdom of this. A museum person or antiques dealer might come along to
the account of the Morris marriage and say "hey, what about marking up
those gifts they exchanged: they are interesting objects". (After all,
the antique silver cup might now be in the Ashmolean: how do you make
that link?) Someone with an interest in architecture might complain
that the church wasn't identified as such in the markup, or a geographer
that you had no means of identifying it as a place within the town
Oxford (or indeed within the county Oxfordshire!).
I think the P5 markup scheme should enable a more agnostic approach to
identifying real-world entities, the relationships between them, and the
events in which they played a part. One obvious start would be to
broaden out persEvent to just "event". This would allow you, for
example, to mark up a subsequent paragraph which notes that the antique
silver cup was stolen in 1863.
And while you are generalizing ... this would be an excellent time to
have a look at the CRM (http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/), which provides a
well-thought-through object-oriented analysis of exactly these
real-world concepts and relationships. For example, the CRM makes a
distinction between an "event" ("This class comprises changes of states
in cultural, social or physical systems, regardless of scale, brought
about by a series or group of coherent physical, cultural, technological
or legal phenomena") and an "activity" ("This class comprises actions
intentionally carried out by instances of E39 Actor that result in
changes of state in the cultural, social, or physical systems
documented"). By this reckoning, marriage is more an activity than an
event.
I have recently come back to thinking about this sort of issue in the
context of Topic Maps (i.e. Semantic Web stuff). We are looking at
museum catalogue entries as a potential source of gazillions of
assertions about objects, people, events, places, etc. By no means all
of these assertions relate directly to the objects that are catalogued:
they will typically include basic biographical data, for example. In a
similar spirit, I would hope that whatever scheme is adopted for P5 will
allow the automated extraction of assertions for inclusion in TM or OWL
resources.
Richard
--
Richard Light
SGML/XML and Museum Information Consultancy
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