Geographic Name
By Geographic Name, we mean any name or title that can be associated with a Geographic Entity. For example, a collection of Geographic Names may include toponyms, regional names and ethnic names. For examples of some Geographic Names as represented in the Barrington Atlas, see: BAtlasEntityExamples.
For the Pleiades system, we have created a Geographic Name Content Type. These objects fully describe any type of Geographic Name by capturing all the necessary information about them in one place. In Plone, Geographic Names can only exist inside Geographic Entities.
Key Aspects
Some key aspects of our design deserve highlighting:
- a name is associated (certainly or uncertainly) with one of more Time Periods
- all editorial observations about names recognized by BAtlas (e.g., reconstruction, interpolation) are accomodated via Boolean fields (check-boxes in the user interface)
- for non-Roman scripts, a Roman transliteration as well as a Unicode (UTF-8) transcription is supported
Technical Implementation Details
The Geographic Name is implemented via the Pleiades Entity Product.
A diagram illustrating some of the key points made in prose above is provided on our Geographic Entity page. Implementation details, including the specific data fields that make up the Geographic Name, are best reviewed via the detailed Geographic Entity UML model.
For some of the associations and data fields, thesauri of legal values (also known as "controlled vocabularies") are employed to assist users in data entry and to ensure uniformity of data. For more information on this topic, see: Vocabularies.
Design Questions
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