Syrus Marcus Ware →Worlding person entity: E21 Person
Class E21 Person is used here to model people. The scope note for this class uses the term ‘historical figures’ which may be considered as problematic especially when references are made to established conventional historical textbooks. Marking a person as a ‘historical figure’ implies an assessment of their importance in history and as such it provides little room to accommodate those who are not written in the historical text books, who are invisible or hidden. Clarification is needed on the use of the term in the scope note to include any person who has existed regardless of their contextual history. The examples included in the scope note are Western focused and the scope note should be revised to make visible historical actors, by referring to the histories of resistance of people of color. The class E21 Person and its superclass E39 Actor imply that after one’s death there is no capacity for agency. The necessity of being alive excludes experiences of dead people being present in rituals from various religions. Class E39 Actor does not include non-human actors. While examples are rare and almost always correspond to documenting species as opposed to individual organisms (for example the performance piece FreePort), this class is not suitable to describe the agency of animals. Additionally, from other perspectives and ontologies an object has as much agency as a person, for example the Benin bronzes being considered as living ancestors and the agency of the sacred altars of K’iche’ Maya.
Name(s)Worlding database field "Name(s)"
P1 is identified by → E41 Appellation: ‘E41 Appellation’ is used to model names of people (or groups) and ‘P1 is identified by’ is used to model the fact that a person is referred to by a name. The idea that the signifier and the signified structure are separate is not universal. In some cultures the process of naming results in both the signifier and the signified. For example, in traditional China, naming equals producing "real-world" things. In such cases this property and field only provides a partial view. At the beginning of the scope note of property ‘P1 is identified by’ it is unclear why the term "real-world" is mentioned when fictional things can also have names. ‘P1 is identified by’ is a shortcut property which misses the identifier assignment event. This means that the agency of the person naming and the location and period of the process of naming are not modelled in this case.
Syrus Marcus Ware (appellation in English) →Worlding appellation entity: E41 Appellation
Class E41 Appellation is used here to model names of things including places and people. The scope note of E41 Appellation explains that names are not considered as meaningful but as conventions. A name is used by convention even if there is a meaning attached to it. It is possible that names mentioned in the WPC database also hold a meaning which is significant for the thing they refer to as part of its identity. If this is the case, then this class and content type cannot capture that meaning.