TEI - why we need to keep it simple

The experience of the Diplomatarium Danicum project

Mogens Devantier & Thomas Hansen, Society for Danish Language and Literature

Diplomatarium Danicum

Goal: Publish all documents pertaining to Denmark, AD 789-1450 Currently: 3-year Carlsberg Foundation project aiming at  development of• Textbank - archive with standardized texts1. Web-application - consumer of standardized texts

 Future: Textbank leverages1. publication of documents 1413-1450 - app 8500 texts– transformed material 1401-1412 - app 3000 texts [

http://diplomatarium.dk/]

– digitized annotated material 789-1400 - app 15 000 texts

 

Why TEI?

Two reasons 1. The most popular way of communicating data that are

o portableo fine-grained and structured

 2. The XML modus operandi 

o Specializationo Standardizationo Routinization

TEI - it gets complicated

Standardization "lite" - TEI has guidelines, not specifications, so• Specialization needed at all levels• Routinization difficult

 When routinization is obstructed, portability is compromised• Format inconsistency • Tag-abuse• Missing information - non-existant or undetermined?

Serious problems • querying - low precision, low recall• rendering - maintaining stylesheets is difficult

Simplify: Controlling input with a TEI user interfaceStandardize! - develop your own standard and map it to TEI

Make it operable with • schema• stylesheet

 Make it intelligible with  • documentation

 Make documentation transparent and accessible with• URIs

Simple uniform resources are strategic

Immediate advantages in terms of • usability• management - segmentation of work, enriching markup• easier implementation• support

 Short-term advantages in terms of • preservation - attainable and should be promoted

 Long-term advantages in terms of• interoperability - essential to the final vision, but not always

attainable right now

Short-term advantages of simple

Indications of an emerging market for text resources:  • Centralization - more resources in fewer repositories

o EU-CLARIN o National research infrastructures

• Maximization - more texts, more consumers, more tools• Specialization - producers, preservers, consumers

Markets depend on standards in order to compare the goods - therefore, most infrastructure projects implement TEI

Long-term advantages of simple

Given the fact that• no single archive will ever hold all resources, and• no single XML markup schema will ever be imposed on all

resources- users will, at some point, depend on interoperation between different archives and resources Interoperation requires standardization - a set of shared semantics implemented by a service that may function as a single point of access to distributed resources 

Conclusion - We need to keep it simple because...if the standard is observed• users will have immediate access to more resources• the resources will be better preserved, and • services will have easier access to more resources

After all... "a complex system that works is always based on a simple system that works"                                                     -freely adapted from John Gall, Systemantics, 1978

Contact: th@dsl.dk