[osis-core] Index Syntax

[Steve DeRose]

At 03:35 PM -0400 07/02/02, Harry Plantinga wrote:
>  > Yes; if the index entries are being marked, hopefully they are being
>>  marked in the text where they go; in which case you can either
>>  auto-generate a page or canonical id as appropriate, or do without
>>  (since the index is essentially the result of a query for all these
>>  index-entry elements, and in the result, you could have anything you
>>  wanted, since the machine can take you right to where it was
>>  generated from.
>>
>>  ...
>>
>>  Oh, one other nit: Should we do anything for 'see' and 'see also'?
>
>I've been hesitating to bring it up, so thanks!  There probably should
>be a way of handling see and see also.  There could be several
>'see also's so a single seealso attribute is not adequate. How does
>TEI handle these issues?

I see nothing for it in the TEI section on index entries.

One issue is that a 'see' or 'see also' has no principled place to 
exist, since it doesn't relate to a particular place in the text 
where a topic is referenced -- they are logically internal to the 
index itself, for which we have no representation.

If we can think of a place to put them, something trivial would 
likely suffice, like:


<indexSee title='Index of Subjects'
           key1='Wars' key2='World War 1'
           see1='Wars' key2='Great War, The'
           seeAlso='T'>

something like this lets you specify the precise placement of the 
referring and referenced index entry (by up to 4 level keys).

If I'm thinking rightly, the difference between 'see' and 'see also' 
is simply whether there are entries associated with the referring key 
too, or only with the referenced key.

I just realized that a really friendly indexer will notice 
seeAlso='F' and automatically re-key any local entries that were 
accidentally created, so they get listed under the referenced key -- 
that would have saved me 2-3 full days of work on my first book....

-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@speakeasy.net
Backup email: sderose@mac.com, sjd@stg.brown.edu