TEI META Task Force: Report for Members Meeting [MEW06]

Contents

This report should be read in conjunction with the other reports at /Activities/META/ .

The task force has not yet met face to face, operating only by email, but two fruitful full-day meetings in October 2003 between Lou Burnard, Sebastian Rahtz, and Norm Walsh, and Lou Burnard, Sebastian Rahtz, and Laurent Romary, resulting in documents MEW 02, MEW 03, MEW 04 and MEW 05. Attention is drawn to the analysis in MEW 02 of the relationship between TEI and Docbook element classes, as this may prove a fertile area of future collaboration. The discussion recorded MEW 05 about linking TEI names to corresponding concepts in ISO is also a very important development for the future.

The timetable of work under the META umbrella is expected to be as follows:
  1. November 2003: release stable alpha version of P5 schemas and Guidelines (in HTML) for comment by members
  2. November 2003: first draft of new TEI module for tag documentation
  3. December 2003: freeze new ODD format, and hand over P5 sources in this form to TEI editors
  4. January 2004: alpha release of Pizza Chef replacement for ad hoc generation of schemas
  5. February 2004: first release of P5 with new/revised modules for manuscript descriptions, feature structures, characters, and linking.
The remaining sections in this report describe the progress on the task force's jobs of:
  1. Revision of the ODD format to be entirely independent of the SGML/XML notation for DTDs
  2. Combination of the ODD format and the current TEI DTD for tag documentation (TSD) into a single standard TEI tagset.
  3. Basing the new notation on one of the XML schema languages.
  4. Creation of additional processors to make not only XML DTDs (and possibly SGML as well), but also at least one XML schema format.
  5. Conversion of data types should be converted to use the datatype library of the W3C.
  6. Rewriting the Pizza Chef to allow user choice of DTD or schema output.
The final result will be a new version of the TEI Guidelines.

Revision of ODD format

The markup used to create the TEI Guidelines, from which both documentation and DTDs/Schemas are derived, has been reviewed several times, and three important sets of changes have been made:
  1. Elements which have content of literal SGML/XML code have been converted either to have neutral TEI markup
  2. Element names have been changed to make them more independent of SGML DTD naming, and to make them more consistent with the rest of the TEI. The main reference documentation for element classes, elements, and patterns (entities) has been simplified
  3. Element content models have been converted to use Relax NG syntax
This process should now be complete. The next stage will be to release sample subsets of the TEI source for comment by other working groups (eg manuscripts, feature structures, and standoff markup), to check that they are useable for future editing.

New module for tag documentation

The revision of the TSD tagset, to turn it into a proper TEI module and to make it conform to the current Guidelines source, has not yet been started. It is planned to complete this during November 2003.

Schema language

The Guidelines have been converted to express element syntactic constraints using Relax NG. This work is complete, and awaiting more user testing. The Relax NG compact syntax is used for display in the HTML version of the Guidelines.

Processors to generate schemas

Tools to generate RelaxNG schemas and DTDs from the new Guidelines have been completed, written as XSLT transforms. The results await user testing.

A tool to generated W3C Schemas from the Guidelines has not been written. It is intended to produce them using James Clark's trang program from the RelaxNG schemas, on demand.

Datatypes

As described in the May report, 23 datatypes (linked to W3C datatypes where relevant) have been defined, and linked to all the simple attribute cases. Work has not yet started on looking at element content models to see where they would benefit from datatyping.

Pizza chef rewrite

A prototype processor to replace the pizza chef, called roma was developed to demonstrate at XML Europe 2003; it works by offering a fixed set of choices (including exotica like using MathML as the content for <formula> ), but has not yet been revised to work with the latest revision of P5. Work will start on this in January 2004.

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