Pepys-Map : 27th – 28th September 1661

In the entry for 27th September we find a form of gift event. Lady Montague receives grapes and melons sent by her husband and brought by Captain Country. This is modelled as a gift-event, with a new role of ‘courier’ added which is played by Country:

[event-16610927-05 : gift-event = "Richard Country brings exotic fruits from Sir Edward Montague (27th September 1661)";"16610927-05"]
occurs(event-16610927-05 : event, today : on)
participation(event-16610927-05 : event,
jemima-montague : recipient,
richard-country : courier,
sir-edward-montague : giver,
melons : gift,
grapes : gift,
wardrobe-court : place)

A similar form is used for the melons delivered to Samuel – although in this case the courier is not known.
The entry for 28th September is very straightforward with only four events modelled. The play “Father’s Own Son” is a comedy written by John Fletcher and also known as “Monsieur Thomas”.

Continue reading

XML Schema To XTM

A while ago I started work on some XSLT transforms for creating a topic map of a W3C XML Schema. Its definitely not a straightforward task, just handling nested includes and class hierarchies is hard from XSLT.
Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to work on these stylesheets for a while, so I’m posting them under the Reciprocal Public License in the hope that some one else (LMG ? ;-) might pick them up and contribute more to them. There are two stylesheets:
schema2xtm.xsl works on the schema file directly. This is probably the least-finished of the two.
psv2xtm.xsl works on the PSV output generated by the XSV schema processor. To use this stylesheet, you must first validate your schema with XSV, requesting the PSV output as XML, then run the stylesheet against that output.

Pepys-Map : 26th September 1661

A short entry today. In which:

  • Samuel works at the Navy Office.
  • Samuel dines at home.
  • Samuel and Elizabeth go to the theatre to see ‘A King and No King’ performed. The diary mentions that they travel each way by coach so this is captured as two separate travelling-events preceding and following the performance.
  • Samuel works at home on his correspondence. No details about the work are given, so this is modelled simply as a generic working event.

It is worth noting that the play is one of several collaborations by John Fletcher (already encountered as writer of ‘The Tamer Tamed’), and Francis Beaumont. This is modelled in the topic map by using a single ‘written-by’ association with two players of the ‘writer’ role.

Continue reading

Pepys-Map : 24th-25th September 1661

Two entries uploaded today.
In the entry for 24th September, events modelled are:

  • Samuel and Elizabeth return home from Welwyn.
  • On the way, they stop off at the Mother Red Cap tavern in Holloway for a drink (the name of the tavern is provided by a note on the PepysDiary.com site.
  • Samuel receives a letter telling him of a naval action that Sir Edward Montague has been involved in. The action is given a subject indicator to allow reference from later diary entries.
  • Samuel visits Jemima Montague.

For the 25th September, the events modelled are:

  • Samuel and William Penn take a coach to Covent Garden.
  • Samuel visits his cousin Thomas and discusses country business with him.
  • Samuel meets Robert Slingsby in St. Martin’s Lane
  • Samuel and Slingsby take his coach to Whitehall.
  • Samuel visits William Coventry.
  • Samuel dines with John Crew.
  • Samuel attends a performance of “The Merry Wives Of Windsor” at the Theatre Royal. It being Shakespeare, Sam hates it.
  • Samuel goes drinking with William Penn and Sir G. More (a person not encountered before in the diary).

Continue reading

Pepys-Map: 16th – 23rd September 1661

Catching up with a number of entries missed due to a combination of slackness and being at XML Open this week. To comment on all of the files would probably be as tedious to read as it would be to write, but you can always read all of the entries on PepysDiary.com.
One interesting addition to the ontology is a pair of events. I’ve added a “borrowing” event with roles “borrower” and “lender”. I’ve made the existing “loan” event a subclass of borrowing on the principle that a loan event is a borrowing event where the borrower agrees to repay some interest as well as the borrowed amount. I’ve also added a “hiring” event, which I have made a subclass of both “borrowing” and of “purchase” – topic maps does not restrict you to having a single class hierarchy, although this could cause problems later on so I’ll plan to revisit this when I get a chance to tidy up the ontology.
Another item that will need tidying is the addition of a topic for “horse”. Currently this is made a direct subclass of “creature” which puts it on the same level in the ontology as “primate”. My feeling is that it is not wise to have “primate” and “horse” at the same level of the hierarchy and again, this part of the ontology will need revisting during any cleanup.

Continue reading

Pepys-Map : 15th September 1661

Today’s entry is another straightforward one in modelling terms. The events modelled are:

  • Samuel goes to the late Julian Kite’s home to meet with his uncle Thomas Fenner and make arrangements for the burial. This is modelled as a visiting event with Thomas Fenner as the “visited” and the Kites’ house as the place.
  • Samuel dines at home.
  • Samuel and Elizabeth go to their church.
  • The funeral of Julian Kite. I have included Thomas Fenner and Margaret Kite in the mourners. The diary says that there is Fenner’s family present, but I have not made an exhaustive list of them here. This may be added later if it becomes important.
  • Samuel and Elizabeth accompany Margaret Kite back to her house.
  • Samuel, Elizabeth and William Joyce travel back to the Pepys’ home.
  • Samuel and William have a drink back at the house.

Continue reading

Pepys-Map : 14th September 1661

Today’s entry has the following events modelled:

  • Samuel does some work at the Navy Office.
  • Samuel visits the Royal Exchange.
  • Thomas Fenner visits Samuel at his home.
  • Robert and Elizabeth Slingsby (and unidentified others) call for the Samuel and Elizabeth.
  • Thomas Fenner and Thomas Pepys are left at Samuel’s house to dine.
  • Samuel and Robert Slingsby and their wives go to see four yachts on the river.

For the moment, I have modelled the last event as a generic “recreation-event” and made the yachts the “subject” of that event. When the ontology is reviewed it might be worth seeing if there is a subclass of recreation-event that can be extracted from this perhaps “viewing-event” ?

Continue reading

Pepys-Map : 13th September 1661

Today’s entry has a couple of interesting points to the model.
In the first event of the day, Samuel is called to his uncle’s house to discuss arrangements for the burial of his Aunt Kite who died yesterday. There are two things to note here. Firstly, we don’t need to model the death as an event, because that was already entered in the biographical topic map when Aunt Kite was first introduced about a week ago. Secondly, we need to model the event of Aunt Kite’s funeral in advance of its occurrence. To facilitate the merging of the event information that we have from todays entry (which is scant) with information we will probably get when the funeral takes place, I have created a subject identifier for the funeral event.
The second item of note actually comes from annotations on the PepysDiary.com site. The annotations for Doctors Commons (both the map referred to from the annotations and the text of one annotation) describe the geographical location of the Doctors’ Commons by the streets that form its boundary. This seemed like a good thing to model. So I have created an association type “bounded-by” and role types “bounded” for the place whose bounds are described by the association and then north-bounds, south-bounds, east-bounds and west-bounds for the four compass points (all that I need for now). The association itself is expressed as a 5-way relationship between the Doctor’s Commons and the four streets that form its boundary:

bounded-by(drs-commons : bounded,
great-knightrider-st : north-bounds,
st-bennets-hill : east-bounds,
addle-hill : west-bounds,
thames-st : south-bounds)

My reason for doing this (rather than four binary relationships) is that I want the single association to capture all of the information about the boundary – in practice there can be no boundary without all of the sides being enumerated, so to my mind it doesn’t make sense to have four separate partial descriptions.
I could have chosen to create a “borders-with” association, which would make sense to be modelled as four separate binary relationships as the fact that X border’s Y is not dependent on the fact that X also borders Z.
The association and role types are all defined in the “places” topic map.

Continue reading