Encoding Semantic Aspects
A. Dates
<date when="YYYY-MM-DD"></date>
encloses a date, however it is articulated. You might see a standard situation like the following:
She was born on <date when="1970-04-01">April 1, 1970</date>.
If you had only year, this would be the format:
<date when="1970">1970</date>
Only month and year would be:
<date when="1980-02">February 1980</date>
Only month and day won't validate, so if you cannot determine a year, use "9999" as a placeholder year.
Sometimes references to dates aren’t explicit, but we can still tag them, as in:
<date when="1970">The next year</date>,
her parents moved to Florida.
Explicit dates should be marked up, but doing so with non-explicit references is at your discretion.
B. Names
1. Individual people
<name type="person"></name>
encloses the proper name of a person, as in:
<name type="person">Diana Greene/name>
This can also be used to mark common nouns or phrases that refer to a specific, identifiable person, as in:
The <name type="person">current superintendent</name>
of the local public school system...
where current superintendent refers, for instance, to a specific person we can name (and probably annotate).
We can also use <name> to mark up pronouns (he, etc.) when they refer to specific, identifiable people. In many cases, this may be redundant and lead to an excessive amount of markup. In others, however, it might make sense. A good approach may be to do this only if the actual antecedent (the person being referred to) hasn't been mentioned in a while, or hasn't been mentioned explicitly at all.
2. Groups of people
<name type="person_group"></name>
encloses a proper noun indicating the name of a group of people that has a particular name, such as those of a given nationality or some other category. We would typically write this type of word with an initial capital, but not always. Here are some examples:
the <name type="person_group">Seminole</name> and
<name type="person_group">Creek</name>
and
the <name type="person_group">British</name> and
<name type="person_group">French</name>
As with <name type="person">, we could potentially mark up a pronoun ("they," "them") when it refers to a specific, identifiable group, with the same caveats mentioned above.
3. Places
<name type="place"></name>
encloses the proper names of places of any type. This includes buildings, streets, cities, states (and other political divisions), as well as geographical features like rivers, lakes, etc. for example:
<name type="place">Jacksonville</name>
This can also be used to mark common nouns or phrases that refer to specific, identifiable places, as in:
the level of toxicity in the <name type="place">river</name> has increased...
where river refers, for instance, to the St. John's. As discussed above, it may often make sense to do so only when the actual antecedent hasn't been mentioned recently, or at all.
The subtype attribute can be used to provide a more specific category for a place, as in
<name type="place" subtype="river">St. John's River</name>
and
<name type="place" subtype="city">Jacksonville</name>
Let's handle specific street addresses as follows:
<name type="place" subtype="address">123 Main Street</name>
For places that can be located on a map, you can include latitude and longitude as follows:
<name type="place">The Clara White Mission<location><geo>30.332632 -81.664020</geo></location></name>
To get this information, search for the place in Google Maps, right click on the location on the map and select "What's here?". A box will pop up showing the coordinates. If you aren't able to copy the numbers from there, click on them, and they will appear in the search box at the left, from where you will be able to copy them.
4. Companies and organizations
<name type="company"></name>
or
<name type="organization"></name>
can be used to tag the names of such entities.
Let's use
<name type="organization" subtype="government_body">
for governmental entities.
5. Events
<name type="event"></name>
can be used to indicate the name of an organized event, as in:
<name type="event">The World's Fair</name>
C. Titles
<title level="m"></title>
encloses the title of a monographic ("m") work (a book, primarily).
<title level="a"></title>
encloses the title of an "analytic" ("a") work (a journal chapter, an article, etc.)