Tagging of names, person references, and links to prosopographical disambiguation.

• TEI definition: persName ; EpiDoc-specific customization: persName
• TEI definition: name ; EpiDoc-specific customization: name

Personal names in the text may be tagged using the persName element.

TEI includes several elements for marking up the individual subparts of a personal name, including forename, surname, addName, genName and roleName. Most EpiDoc projects however have decided that these do not unproblematically map onto the nomenclature of Greek and Roman antiquity, or other cultures whose documentary texts are being encoded, and so the more generic element name has been used to encode the individual names within a complete person reference. The type attribute on name may be used to specify the class of name.

The recommended usage of type on persName, as applied in projects using the London style (IAph, IRT, IRCyr, IOSPE), inlcudes five values:

• attested
• Note: - stands for "Person attested locally"-- other than emperors, consuls, godsemperor
• Note: - stands for member of imperial family (in projects involving the Greek world outside of the Roman empire we have used "ruler" instead of emperor, as a more catch-all term)divine
• Note: - divinities, including both Olympian gods, angels/saints/etc., and abstract figures such as Agathe Tycheconsul
• Note: - (not actually used, but suitable for tagging the names of eponymous consuls, archons or priests *only* where they are used in dating formulae)other

Just as the lemmata of words may be recorded to facilitate indexing or searching, names may be linked to their nominative-singular form (or similar in other languages). No lemma attribute is available on name or persName, however, so the more involved attribute nymRef should be used instead. This attribute can be used to link the instance of a name in text to a corresponding nym element that provides additional information about orthography, primary reference form (e.g., nominative singular), etc. Best practice is to develop a separate xml file in which the nym elements are encoded, usually inside a <nymList>. The following examples assume the existence of such a separate file (nametable.xml) and generally make use of the nominative form of the name as the linking value, appearing after the hash (#) character in nymRef and without hash or other prefix in the xml:id on the corresponding nym. More information on the extensive options available for describing the name and its forms inside the nym element may be found in the TEI Guidelines section "13.3.5 Names and Nyms". Note that the nymRef attribute links to information about the standard form of a name, not to the unique person to whom a name instance refers (on which see below).

A personal name of an attested individual, including cognomina but not "Imperator", shoud be tagged as a name. An imperial cognomen such as "Sarmaticus" should be tagged as a name. The element name cannot take part, so in the case of an incomplete name, a seg element needs to appear inside the name.

Where a personal name string includes a patronymic, or other references to people such as adoptive father, husband, owner/patron etc., a further persName element may be nested inside the first, such that, for example, "Apollonios son of Adrastos" is identified as one person, while his father "Adrastos" is another.

Individual persons may also identified by a ref attribute containing a URL or other URI pointing to an entry in a person database or online prosopography (see further Indexing and controlling persons and names).