-ography for "things"?

I'm trying to use TEI-XML as a lossless export format for texts edited in FromThePage, the collaborative transcription/translation tool I run, and have a question for the group.

FromThePage has the concept of a "subject" that appears within the text, which is basically any sort of thing that would appear as a term in an index.  These may be people, places, organizations, but also scientific species recorded by a naturalist, items sold by a storekeeper, sicknesses, barn-raisings, culinary dishes, weather, or any other item classified within an edition-specific ontology.  In addition to classification, each subject has a canonical title and may also have a biographical entry.

I'm already using the -ography section of the TEI header to generate entries for Persons and Places, using personList, person, persName and note elements (or the corresponding versions for Places).  Each exported person has a nice id which can be used for a ref attribute within rs elements within the text.

My question is this:  is there a generic equivalent for person/personList/persName?  Is anyone creating "thing-ographies"?  If not, how are you handling references to e.g. "piloncillo" within a text, which is an indexable term but which also requires definition?

Ben W. Brumfield
http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/
http://fromthepage.com/