P5: Directrices para la codificación y el intercambio de textos electrónicos

Information about people, places, and organizations, of whatever type, essentially comprises a series of statements or assertions relating to:

• characteristics or traits which do not, by and large, change over time
• characteristics or states which hold true only at a specific time
• events or incidents which may lead to a change of state or, less frequently, trait.

‘Characteristics’ or ‘traits’ are typically independent of an individual's volition or action and can be either physical, such as sex or hair and eye colour, or cultural, such as ethnicity, caste, or faith. The distinction is not entirely straightforward, however: while sex is fairly obviously a physical trait, gender should rather be regarded as culturally determined, and the division of mankind into different ‘races’, proposed by early (white European) anthropologists on the basis of physical characteristics such as skin colour, hair type and skull measurements, is by many modern cultural anthropologists now considered to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact. Furthermore, while some characteristics will obviously change over time, hair colour for example, none, in principle—not even sex—is immutable.

‘States’ include, for example, marital status, place of residence and position or occupation. Such states have a definite duration, that is, they have a beginning and an end and are typically a consequence of the individual's own action or that of others.

By ‘changes in state’ are meant the events in a person's life such as birth, marriage, or appointment to office; such events will normally be associated with a specific date or a fairly narrow date-range. Changes in states can also cause or be caused by changes in characteristics. Any statement or assertion on any of these aspects of a person's life will be based on some source, possibly multiple sources, possibly contradictory. Taking all this into account it follows that each such statement or assertion needs to be able to be documented, put into a time frame and be relatable to other statements or assertions of the same or any of the other types.

The elements defined by the module described in this chapter may, for the most part, all be regarded as specializations of one or other of the above three classes. Generic elements for state, trait, and event are also defined:

• state especifica un componente de una referencia canónica definida por el método milestone (hito).
• trait contiene la descripción de una característica personal o cultural determinada atribuida a una persona.
• event (event) cualquier fenómeno o evento no necesariamente vocal o comunicativo, como ruidos accidentales u otros fenómenos que inciden en la comunicación en acto.

  where

  indica la localización de un acontecimiento señalando un elemento <lugar>

• listEvent (list of events) contains a list of descriptions, each of which provides information about an identifiable event.

Information about a person, as distinct from references to a person, for example by name, is grouped together within a person element. Information about a group of people regarded as a single entity (for example ‘the audience’ of a performance) may be encoded using the personGrp element. Note however that information about a group of people with a distinct identity (for example a named theatrical troupe) should be recorded using the org element described in section 13.3.3 Organizational Data below.

These elements may appear only within a listPerson element, which groups such descriptions together, and optionally also describes relationships amongst the people listed.

• listPerson (lista de personas) contiene una lista de descripciones, y cada una de las cuales proporciona información relativa a una persona específica o a un grupo de personas, p.ej, los participantes de una interacción verbal o las personas referidas en una fuente histórica.
• listRelation describe las relaciones o los lazos sociales entre los participantes de una interacción verbal.

One or more listPerson elements may be supplied within the particDesc (participant description) element in the profileDesc element of a TEI Header (see 2.4 The Profile Description). Like other forms of list, however, the listPerson can also appear within the body of a text when the module defined by this chapter is included in a schema.

The person element carries several attributes. First, as a member of att.editLike, which is a subclass of the att.responsibility class, it carries the usual attributes for providing details about the information recorded for that person itself, such as its reliability or source:

• att.responsibility provides attributes indicating who is responsible for something asserted by the markup and the degree of certainty associated with it.

  cert	(certeza) significa el grado de certeza asociado con la intervención o la interpretación.
  resp	(parte responsable) indica el agente responsable de la intervención o la interpretación, p.ej. un editor o un transcriptor.

• att.editLike proporciona atributos que describen la naturaleza de una intervención crítica codificada o una interpretación de cualquier tipo.

  evidence	indica la naturaleza de las pruebas que sostienen la fiabilidad o precisión de la intervención o interpretación.
  source	contiene una lista de uno o más indicadores que indican las fuentes que presentan la lectura dada.

In addition, a small number of very commonly used personal properties may be recorded using attributes specific to person and personGrp :

• person proporciona información relativa a un individuo específico, p.ej. un participante de una interacción verbal o una persona identificada por una fuente histórica.

  role	establece el rol o la clasificación primaria de una persona.
  sex	especifica el sexo de una persona.
  age	especifica un intervalo de edad para una persona.

• personGrp (grupo de personas) describe a un grupo de individuos considerados como una única persona para fines analíticos.

These attributes are intended for use where only a small amount of data is to be encoded in a more or less normalized form, possibly for many person elements, for example when encoding basic facts about respondents to a questionnaire. When however a more detailed encoding is required for all kinds of information about a person, for example in a historical gazeteer, then it will be more appropriate to use the elements age, sex and others described elsewhere in this chapter.

The person element may contain many sub-elements, each specifying a different property of the person being described. The remainder of this section describes these more specific elements. For convenience, these elements are grouped into three classes, corresponding with the tripartite division outlined above: one for traits, one for states and one for events. Each class contains both specific elements for common types of biographical information, and a generic element for other, user-defined, types of information.

All the elements in these three classes belong to the attribute class att.datable, which provides the following attributes:

• att.datable.w3c proporciona atributos para la normalización de elementos que contienen eventos datables.atributos para registrar expresiones temporales normalizadas.

  when	proporciona el valor de una fecha o una hora en un formato estandard.
  notBefore	especifica la fecha más temprana posible para un evento en un formato estándard, p.ej. aaaa-mm-dd.
  notAfter	especifica la fecha más tardana posible para un evento en un formato estándard, p.ej. aaaa-mm-dd.
  from	indica el punto de inicio del período en el formato estándard.
  to	indica el punto final de un periodo en formato estándard.

as discussed in 13.1 Attribute Classes Defined by this Module above.

In 13.2.3 Place Names we discuss various ways of naming places such as towns, countries, etc. In much the same way as these Guidelines distinguish between the encoding of names for people and the encoding of other data about people, so they also distinguish between the encoding of names for places and the encoding of other data about places. In this section we present elements which may be used to record in a structured way data about places of any kind which might be named or referenced within a text. Such data may be useful as a way of normalizing or standardizing references to particular places, as the raw material for a gazetteer or similar reference document associated with a particular text or set of texts, or in conjunction with any form of geographical information system.

The following elements are provided for this purpose:

• listPlace (lista de lugares) contiene una lista de lugares, seguida opcionalmente por una lista de interelaciones (a excepción de la inclusión) definidas entre ellos.
• place contiene los datos sobre una localización geográfica

The model.placeStateLike class contains elements describing characteristics of a place which have a definite duration, such as its name. Any member of the model.placeNamePart may be used for this purpose, since a place element will usually contain at least one, and possibly several, placeName-like elements indicating the names associated with it, by different people, in different languages, or at different times.

For example, the modern city of Lyon in France was in Roman times known as Lugdunum. Although the modern and the Roman city are not physically co-extensive, they have significant areas which overlap, and we may therefore wish to regard them as the same place, while supplying both names with an indication of the time period during which each was current.

A place is defined, however, by its physical location, which does not typically change over time. Locations may be specified in a number of ways: as a set of coordinates defining a point or an area on the surface of the earth, or by providing a description of how the place may be found, usually in terms of other place names. For example, we can identify the location of the Canadian city of London, either by specifying its latitute and longitude, or by specifying that we mean the city called London located in the province called Ontario within the country called Canada.

In addition we may wish to supply a brief characterization of the place identified, for example to state that it is a city, an administrative area such as a country, or a landmark of some kind such as a monument or a battlefield. If our typology of places is simple, the open ended type attribute is the easiest way to represent it: so we might say <place type="city">, <place type="battlefield"> etc.

Within the place element, the following elements may be used to provide more information about specific aspects of the place in a structured form:

• placeName contiene la indicación absoluta o relativa de un nombre de lugar.
• location define la localización de un lugar como conjunto de coordenadas geográficas, en términos de alguna entidades geopolítica dada, o como dirección.

The following elements for the encoding of dates and times were introduced in section 3.5.4 Dates and Times:

• date contiene una fecha en cualquier formato.
• time contiene un sintagma que define un momento del día en cualquier formato.

The current module namesdates provides a mechanism for more detailed encoding of relative dates and times. A relative temporal expression describes a date or time with reference to some other (absolute) temporal expression, and thus may contain an offset element in addition to one or more date or time elements:

• offset la parte de una expresión temporal o espacial relativa que indica la dirección del desfase entre dos nombres de lugar, fecha u horario al interno de la expresión.

As members of the att.datable and att.duration classes, which in turn are members of att.datable.w3c and att.duration.w3c respectively, the date and time elements share the following attributes:

• att.datable.w3c proporciona atributos para la normalización de elementos que contienen eventos datables.atributos para registrar expresiones temporales normalizadas.

  when	proporciona el valor de una fecha o una hora en un formato estandard.

• att.duration.w3c atributos para registrar un periodo temporal normalizado

  dur	(duración) indica la longitud de este elemento en el tiempo.