Introduction

This document is a draft for a new section of the Guidelines which will document the TEI approach to recording biographical data and define elements appropriate for this purpose. The approach taken is to build on the existing elements person (in the corpus module) and persName (in the module for names and dates). At the time of writing no decision has been taken about how the module in which this material should finally be included.

Model and attribute classes

The elements described here make use of the existing attribute classes att.datable, att.editLike and att.named and a number of existing model classes.

The datatype of the key attribute, which membership in att.named confers on an element, is data.key. For our purposes we redefine this as data.code, so that it may be used to supply any URI.

In addition we define the following new model classes:

a valid URI the class of elements describing generally unchanging physical or socially-constructed characteristics of a person, for example hair-colour, ethnicity, sex... These characteristics of an individual are typically independent of their volition or action.

the class of elements describing changeable characteristics of a person which have a definite duration, for example occupation, residence, name... These characteristics of an individual are typically a consequence of their own action or that of others.

the class of elements describing specific events in a person's history, for example birth, marriage, appointment... These are not characteristics of an individual, but often cause an individual to gain such characteristics, or to enter a new state.

the class of elements concerning which assertions are made, for example as parts of a biographical element.

New elements

With these classes in place, we define the following new elements:

specifies the sex of a person.

Values for this attribute are taken from ISO 5218:1977 ; 0 indicates unknown; 1 indicates male; 2 indicates female; and 9 indicates not applicable.

female specifies the faith, religion, or belief set of a person. protestant summarizes the state of a person's linguistic knowledge, either as prose or by a list of langKnown elements. supplies one or more valid language tags for the languages specified

This attribute should be supplied only if the element contains no langKnown children. Its values are language tags as defined in RFC 3066 or its successor

British English and French British English French contains a description of a personal or culturally-determined characteristic attributed to a person. citizenship Between 1987 and 1997

Held status of naturalized UK citizen

The reference #BritCit should indicate some definition of the category "British Citizenship elsewhere, for example in the header or some external source.

Eye colour

Blue

contains information about a person's period of activity. contains a description of some ongoing status or quality attributed to a person. scholar contains a description of a particular event of significance in the life of a person. matriculation 12 Oct 1972 contains an assertion, explicitly combining some unit of prosopographical information with some supporting annotation or reference Διοκλείους (gen.) A set of assertions, possibly supported by further annotation

Changed elements

The main changes we make are to remove attributes from person and to introduce our new classes.

summarizes the state of a person's knowledge of a single language. supplies a valid language tag for the language concerned.

The values for this attribute are language tags as defined in RFC 3066 or its successor

a code indicating the person's level of knowledge for this language British English French

Removed elements

We also remove some elements.

Schema specification

This schema is available as: DTD syntax RELAX NG compact syntax RELAX NG XML syntax W3C XML schema syntax