Introduction to the TEI

Introduction to the TEI

• where the TEI came from
• architecture of the TEI scheme
• main and auxiliary schemas
• within the main schema: core, base, and additional tag sets

Where does the TEI come from?

From the research community:

Sponsors

• ACH Association for Computers and the Humanities
• ACL Association for Computational inguistics
• ALLC Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing

Funders

• U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities
• Mellon Foundation
• Commission of European Communities DG XIII
• Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada

TEI today

To ensure continued maintenance, the formation of a membership onsortium has been announced in April 1999 and the development of the TEI has been transferred to it. Currently, the hosting members are:

• Brown University
• University of Virginia, USA
• A group of institutions in Nancy, France
• Oxford University, United Kingdom

Goals of the TEI

• better interchange and integration of data
• support for all texts, in all languages, from all periods
• guidance for the perplexed: what to encode
• assistance for the specialist: how to encode any information of interest

TEI Deliverables

• A coherent set of recommendations for text encoding
  • comprising several distinct XML tag sets
  • based on existing practice
  • documented in a reference manual
• Tutorials for general and specialized audiences (in progress)
• Sample texts (not yet)

... but no TEI software

TEI Timeline

TEI releases are named as P (proposal) + release number

• P1: ca. 1990, not complete, circulation only internally
• P2: ca. 1992, circulation internally
• P3: May 1994, first public and complete release, printed in 2 (green) volumes.
• P4: May 2002, first XML aware release
• P5: prerelease January 2005, development continuing

  Major new developments in P5:

  • Namespace for TEI, root element changed to <TEI>
  • Extension module `gaiji' for additional non-standard characters
  • xml:id and xml:lang instead of id and lang
  • XML Pointers instead of TEI Pointers
  • Tagset documentation and manuscript description modules
  • Internal representation changed from DTD fragments to RelaxNG
  • Multiple schema languages (DTD, XSD, RelaxNG)
  • Open development at tei.sourceforge.net

TEI schema Structure

• how to make one markup scheme handle infinite variety of requirements and interests
• all texts are alike
• every text is different
• similar to the database design problem: one construct, many views
• each view a selection from the whole

How Many schemas?

How many schemas are necessary for a project like the TEI?

• one (a `Prussian' schema)
• none (a `Waterloo' schema)
• one per document (a `Californian' schema)

The TEI schemas

• a single main schema with many faces (a `British' schema)
• many tags (over 400)
• organized into tag sets
• grouped into classes
• several auxiliary schemas for specialized information:
  • writing system / character set
  • feature system (for feature-structure notation)
  • tag set documentation
  • independent, free-standing TEI header

The Pizza Model (XML version)

<!ELEMENT pizza 
 (base, (tomatoSauce & cheese), topping*) > 
 <!ELEMENT base (thinCrust | pan | stuffed) > 
 <!ELEMENT topping (mushrooms | pepperoni | 
  sausage | pepper | anchovies | ...) >