The large number of authority records, the different spellings and the general existence of multiple variants, have imposed a standardization.

The evident variability concerns the name and patronymic as well as the company denominations. The practice of 'Italianizing' foreign appellations is widespread. The Italian language was moreover understood and widely used in many of the consular chancelleries of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa.

To try to overcome this complexity, we take advantage of the possibility given by the software to indicate 'parallel forms' of the name.

The common Arabic names have been transcribed and conformed to the simplified form, omitting any accent and/or diacritical sign, in the belief that this will facilitate research. The choice comes from the observation that the transliterations of the names, reported both in the headers of the files and in the correspondence preserved in the files, show a variability often due to the use to write down the 'pronunciation' of the name, rather than a precise 'transcription'.

In the index, we choose to use the 'ancient nineteenth-century' toponyms, reported in the documents. Searching by 'current' place name is permitted thanks to references within the system.