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Quick look at a CITE URN

Lexical entities in Lingua Latina are identified by CITE URN. Here is a CITE URN that identifies the feminine noun with lemma form urbs (gen. urbis, "city"):

urn:cite:perseus:latlexent.lex52946.1

You can parse this as follows, reading from left to right.

A CITE URN always begins with urn:cite:. The section up to the next colon (perseus) is the CITE Namespace, that is, the registry from which the subsequent identifier values are taken. For our inventory, we use the Perseus project's data namespace, identified with perseus. The next section up to the first period identifies the collection: latlexent is the collection of Latin lexical entities we are building.

The string up to the next period identifies a specific item in the collection: lex52946 is our identifier for urbs in our vocabulary collection. The final dot-separated portion 1 is a version number. This is version 1 of our record for urbs.

Quick look at the syntax of a CTS URN

Text passages in Lingua Latina are cited by CTS URN. Here is a CTS URN that identifies the opening section of the Annals of Tacitus in the on-line Perseus edition:

urn:cts:latinLit:phi1351.phi005:1.1

You can parse this as follows, reading from left to right.

A CTS URN always begins with cts:urn:. The section up to the next colon is the CTS Namespace, that is, the registry from which the subsequent identifier values are taken. For Tacitus, we use the latinLit registry maintained by the Perseus project. The following section up to the next colon sequentailly identifies the citation group, the work, and possibly a specific version, with each part separated by a period. Here, phi1351 identifies the group of texts cited as "Tacitus", and phi005 identifies the Annals within that group. The remainder of the URN cites a specific passage -- here, book 1, chapter 1 of the the Annals.

How to find a URN when you're reading a Latin text in Perseus

The Perseus web page display of Latin texts contains URNs you can use to cite texts, if you know how to find them.

In the right-hand column of the display, find the section labelled Data/Identifiers. You'll see a line tagged "Text URI". If you open Tacitus' Annals, the text URI will look like this:

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi1351.phi005.perseus-lat1

Drop everything before the string urn:. For the Annals, that leaves us with

urn:cts:latinLit:phi1351.phi005.perseus-lat1

The final portion after the last period identifies the specific version (edition or translation) in Perseus. If you want to cite that version, append a colon and the canonical citation, e.g.,

urn:cts:latinLit:phi1351.phi005.perseus-lat1:1.1

refers to book 1, chapter 1, in a specific edition. To cite the work generally, drop the final section.

urn:cts:latinLit:phi1351.phi005:1.1

cites the same passage in the Annals without specifying a specific translation or edition.