I wrote a long-ish reply to Andy's post, but I think it vanished into the mysterious SMTP aether. My sincere apologies if this is double-posted.
Re. TEI - it's a markup language used in the humanities to mark up digital versions of printed material - plays, novels, diaries, letters etc. There's a really good overview at http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Oxford/2007-02-13-oucs/talk-overview.xml There's a crossover with microformats in that TEI has semantics for describing dates, references to people, places and so on. Also, there's a lot of discussion surrounding TEI on the semantics of printed prose, and the practicalities of marking up the semantics of a document. On the names thing, I suppose I could be tagging something with the name "John Smith", in which case I'd use rel-tag, or making "John Smith" available to be downloaded as a vcard, in which case I'd use hcard. The semantics of "John Smith" haven't changed between those two examples. What I want to do with the phrase "John Smith" has, so the exact microformat I'd use depends on what I want to do with the names in the end, more than their semantics. In the case of historical documents, more often than not I want to build indexes to link documents together. So I want to use place names, references to people, ship names and the names of astronomical objects as tags. For instance, the links to related people on this letter: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/flinders/DisplayDocument.cfm?ID=110 or the links to '2007 WD5' and 'Shoemaker Levy 9' in this blog post: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/rog/2008/01/will_an_asteroid_hit_mars_in_j.html Would that be as simple as using something like <a rel="tag" class="fn"> to indicate that this tag is the name of something? Class makes sense to me, since we talking about different types of full name here. By the way, since that Flinders letter is originally encoded in TEI, but the TEI version is hidden away in a database, it might be useful for serious researchers if we had a mechanism for preserving those semantics in the HTML version of the letter. There's some discussion of this question on Semantic Humanities: http://semantichumanities.wordpress.com/2006/08/26/when-is-semantic-html-not -important/ Jim Original Message: ----------------- From: Andy Mabbett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 00:34:35 +0000 To: [email protected] Subject: [uf-discuss] hCard to represent simple entities (was: Tentativeproposal...) In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jim O'Donnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >> For clarity, the former can be distilled to: >> >> hCard is for representing people, companies, organizations, >>and >> places >Reference strings, in TEI markup at least, can also refer to the names >of books, ships, plays, films and pretty much anything that can be >given a name. hCard works for people and places, but is it general >enough to cover those cases? I think ships are an edge-case for hCard. For books, plays and films, I would think that's a job for a "citation" microformat, once we have one (and one is surely needed). [One could argue that a physical copy of a book could have an hCard, with an extended-address of "Shelf 54, Floor 3, Anytown Library"; but that's really stretching the logic.] As for "pretty much anything", I'll leave that for others to decide ;-) I'm not familiar with TEI: "a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. <http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml> - what does it have to teach us? -- Andy Mabbett _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com – Enhanced email for the mobile individual based on Microsoft® Exchange - http://link.mail2web.com/Personal/EnhancedEmail _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
