Block 2-- includes all data needed to identify the site or temple’s location. In the current schema, the block 2-- has four elements: 200, location (commune), 201 province, 202, region, 203 country. This schema is related to Italian administration so it could not fit administrative system of other nations.
These fields contain names, so they have the problem of the language too. Names of places aren’t usually translated from the language of the country in which they are, but maybe translation tables for most translated locations are useful (for example, to know that the Italian city of Rome is actually called Roma), and certainly is useful as well an explaination of administrative organization of various countries taking part to the survey.
The location of a site is expressed in a hierarchic manner, through definitions going from the exact location to a wider level that is the country where the location is. In Italy, every location (or commune, administrative entity with a mayor) is in a province, every province in a region, and the region is the level just narrower than the state, this schema could not fit other participants’ administrative structure. If we want to expand the survey to a European level, we should find a definition that fits different structures: do German Lander require their own field or can we consider them similar (from the point of view of the help their indication can give to search) to Italian regions? For example we should state a field for a general “level 2 of location description” and then, in one of our tables explain that this level corresponds to Italian regions, German Lander, and so on. Using different fields for every system isn’t possible because this will enormously increase possibility of searching and be an obstacle for it. Anyway, confrontation tables and guides are needed.
The name of the state/nation could be an exception for the use of the original language and be expressed in the language of the database (Germany instead of Deutschland, if we choose English as the common language of database.
We can’t ask to the database user to know every name of foreign province and region, especially when these are many. Apart from confrontation tables among administrative structure and translation tables for most common names, we ought to draw up maps to help identify the name we are looking for; they can be very general or more specific. They aren’t useful only for foreigners, but also for people of the same nation in case that one or more region can be called in different ways: are we going to look for Friuli, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Friuli V.G. (four forms for the same region)?
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