Names of rulers

#1

Dear all,

we discussed this morning our notation of names inside Iconclass notations.

we use for example for “rulers”

61 B 2 (LORENZO <Florenz, Stadtherr, 1, il Magnifico>)

but also

61 B 2 (MEDICI, Lorenzo de)

The first notation is quite widely used and is based on a local set of guidelines of our primary consortium (AKBF).

The second would use instead the GND preferred name.

Is there any Iconclass-related guidance/recommendation in this respect which we could use to decide how to improve and harmonise our data with one or the other of the forms or another better option?

Thank you very much

46A122 armorial bearing, heraldry (with NAME of family)
#2

Dear Pietro,

I have been considering adding support to the Iconclass browser for using well-known identifiers inside the brackets to unambiguously refer to resources. (this was also relevant in the Saints discussion)

My idea:

  • Allow a set of well-known prefixes, plus IDs and use those inside the brackets when noting historical persons. eg. wd: gnd: viaf:
  • When displaying such an item on the iconclass.org site, fetch the language-specific name for that entry from the linked site, and display that.
  • In semantic applications using this data, allow automatic same-as exports for better queries.

So for your example, we can record:

61B2(wd:Q177854)
which when shown in the browser displays as: "61B2(wd:Q177854) Lorenzo de' Medici"

or, you could have also used:
61B2(gnd:118574418)

Both will work (and are the same thing).

As a start, I will probably only do Wikidata and GND, who knows if there is uptake and a clear need, we could support others too.

What do you think of this suggestion?

#3

Thanks for the answer!
From a data point of view, I like that proposition very much. It would be nice to have that feature in the browser.
For the concrete data-entry use case we have, there are several reasons why we would not add data this way, but we could build the relevant URIs additionally. I also appreciate the freedom we can maintain within the brackets. We will probably enter

61 B 2 (Medici, Lorenzo de <Florenz, il Magnifico>)

separately add in our data one or the other of the identifier (because midas has a specific place for that), e.g. wd:Q177854, and produce mixing the two for the users and for further linking an additional

61B2(wd:Q177854)