Typography Graphic Design Thesaurus

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Appendix B. Identifiers

The ANSI/NISO standard addresses the need for proper names in a thesaurus: these

“may be assigned to content objects identifiers, differentiated from topical terms”

(ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005, §6.6.7). Identifiers for people and places fall outside the

scope of the TGDT, but in consideration of its special emphasis on practice, it lists iden-

tifiers for selected instances of four important open-ended classes of identifiers not nor-

mally considered for inclusion in a thesaurus: typefaces, languages, software, and file

formats. In addition, provision is made for creating identifiers for individual characters

within the Unicode character set.

The TGDT distinguishes these identifiers by listing them in italics within square

brackets – for example, the French language is listed as [French (language) ].

Because these identifiers are considered to fall outside the preferred terminology of

the the TGDT proper, they are not assigned classification notations of their own; instead,

the notation for their parent terms may be used with a plus sign (‘+’) appended, followed

by a suitable code as discussed below, if one is available.

Class Identifier Classification notation

Base Qualifier Base + Extension

Typefaces Commonly accepted

name of the typeface

typeface C.44.74.90 + No recommendation

Characters Unicode character

name

character C.44.13.90 + Unicode hexadeci-

mal character code

Languages SIL Ethnologue pri-

mary name

language C.79.9 + SIL Ethnologue

three-letter code

Software Manufacturer’s name

for the software, pre-

ceded by the manu-

facturer’s name if

needed

software C.27.62.9 + No recommendation

File formats Commonly accepted

name (may be an

acronym)

file format C.27.10.30.6 + Commonly used

acronym or initial-

ism

Table 1. Summary of identifier classes.

Table 1 summarizes the recommended practice in constructing identifiers and their clas-

sification notations.