Re: -ography for "things"?

Many thanks to Joe and Martin for pointing me to the
taxonomy/category/catdesc elements.  I wasn't familiar with them at all,
but they look like exactly what I need!

I have a follow-on question.  When encoding names of people or places in an
-ography section of the TEI header, I'm able to generate either
persName/placeName elements or name elements with a type attribute of the
appropriate value.  Either of these options would work fine from a software
development angle, but the editors using the tool to produce TEI-XML for
later editing are less likely to hand-code XSL transformations on the
output than they are to open the files in Oxygen and continue editing.  Are
type-specific elements like persName/placeName more common in the editorial
world than generic name elements with types?  I've only worked on a handful
of hand-coded TEI editions, but my impression is that type-specific
elements are ubiquitous.

Ben

On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 11:23 AM, Joe Wicentowski <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Ben,
>
> You might consider one of the generic elements for "referring strings,"
> namely, <rs> or <name>, instances of which point via @ana to the @xml:id of
> canonical entries in a <taxonomy> in the TEI header:
>
>   http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html#CONARS
>
> Joe
>
> On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 11:22 AM, Ben Brumfield <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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/
>>
>
>