Update Place Types and Crosswalk them with Pleiades and Getty

Finally, it should also be noted that the element names provided by the TEI guidelines may not always match the geo-political terminology as used in the field of Syriac Studies and thus some translation is required for encoding into TEI XML. For example, there is a <district> element in TEI, but this element is defined by the TEI guidelines as a portion of a city, i.e. contained by a settlement. In the example above from David Wilmshurst, the term "district" is used by Wilmshurst to refer to a sub-region surrounding a city. Accordingly, Wilmshurst's "district" has been encoded as a <region> in TEI but labelled with the technical term used in the original source.

Similarly, in some cases the TEI's political terminology is perhaps too narrow for pre-modern history. For example, the TEI only provides <country> and <bloc> as entities larger than a region. In this case, the Syriac Gazetteer has chosen to view the TEI element <country> as equivalent to the "sovereign state" entity as defined by the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus and the "state (polity)" place type as defined in Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places, even if the term "country" is an anachronistic label for the Roman Empire (http://syriaca.org/place/166). A full list of the place type definitions used by Syriac.org is available here.

srophe / syriaca-data

Update Place Types and Crosswalk them with Pleiades and Getty #812