TEI P5: What’s in It for Me?

The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines for
Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange are a community based standard for text encoding that aim to “apply to texts in any natural language, of any date, in any literary genre or text type, without restriction on form or content.” The basic idea is not to tell scholars,
librarians, and other encoders *what* to encode, but rather
*how* to encode that which they choose to record. Of course the Guidelines cannot possibly anticipate every feature that users may wish to encode, and therefore the capability to extend the encoding scheme described by the Guidelines in a consistent, easily understood, and
interchangeable manner is paramount.
Over the past few years the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (the organization charged with maintaining, developing, promulgating, and promoting the Guidelines) has been working steadily toward a new release of the Guidelines. This much anticipated version, referred to as “P5”, is significantly different from the current Guidelines
(“P4”), and yet performs the same basic function of
providing a community based standard for encoding literary
and linguistic texts.
In this presentation, the TEI editors will present P5 as of the latest release, with an emphasis on the ease with which P5 can be customized to particular uses. The talk will start with an overview of what P5 is, what it is good for, and why one would want to use it, and then progress to some of the detailed differences between P4 and P5.
Topics addressed will include:
* The general goal of the TEI Guidelines
- TEI is a community initiative, driven by the needs of its members and users * How work gets done in the TEI - technical council and work groups
- open source using Sourceforge
- special interest groups
* Why do this -- isn’t P4 good enough?
- P4 is just P3 in and using XML
- a lot has happened since P3 was released, including the creation of the W3C and the acceptance of Unicode
- there are arenas P4 does not cover
- lots of improvements, repairs, etc. are in order
* What’s new and different
- infrastructural
+ schemata
+ datatypes
+ classes
+ customization
- attributes used wherever textual content allowed
- major updates
+ manuscript description
+ character sets & language identification
+ feature structures (now an ISO standard)
+ pointing mechanism
- less major updates
+ dictionaries
+ multiple hierarchies
+ support for graphics and multimedia
+ support for stand-off markup
- new updates
+ personography
+ terminological databases
+ collation sequences
* customization
- customizations permit a project to select which parts of the TEI scheme they will use, and to add new bits if needed
- in P5, all uses of TEI are customizations of one sort or another
- customizations, and the user’s documentation for them, are written in a TEI file
- thus customizations themselves can be interchanged or even shared
- in theory, a customization can use another customization as its starting point - thus permitting customizations of customizations
* The TEI universe
- the TEI universe is one where all projects share a common base, but many use additional, local markup constructs
- clusters of similar projects can share common subsets of additional markup constructs