ABSTRACT
Fragmented texts, implied and ambiguous data, and cross-references present further problems which violate the hierarchical assumptions of ordered hierarchy of content objects (OHCO). This chapter presents the instances of such exceptions to hierarchy occurring in historical documents, and explores their implications for the encoding and analysis of data embedded within texts. It explores one such category of documents, probate records, and particularly the probate inventory, using a small XML database of records from seventeenth-century Thame, in Oxfordshire. The chapter provides the examples of exceptions to hierarchy, particularly those resulting from implied and fragmented data, and discuss alternative approaches to encoding them. The chapter also presents the use of XQuery and XPath to interrogate data with hierarchical anomalies. The goal is to identify markup approaches which permit researchers to interrogate native XML databases without advanced programming skills, just as they would interrogate the structured databases with which they are more familiar.
