The TEI Ontologies SIG has been active for four years since its establishment at the TEI meeting in 2004. In this period, there has been development in two different, but related, directions in our field.

Firstly, a new version of P5 has been developed. In this process, SIG members have played a part, especially in the expansion of chapter 13, Names, Dates, People, and Places. Much of the information important to our work, e.g. related to persons and places, can now be easily tagged in TEI.

A second line of work has been on clarifying how connections between TEI and external conceptual models or ontologies should be made. Even with the expansion of TEI, this is still a necessary solution in many cases.

The proposed panel consists of three papers covering different aspects of the relation between TEI and cultural heritage ontologies. In all the papers, the practices described include the use of external ontologies, and each of the paper will describe why this solution is chosen. We hope that one of the outcomes of this panel will be a clearer understanding of why such solutions are chosen, and some criteria for when the use of TEI only, without such external models, will be a better choice.

References

• TEI (2007): TEI P5. Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. TEI Consortium. URL: http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/ (checked 2008-04-30)
• TEI Ontologies SIG webpage. URL: http://www.tei-c.org/wiki/index.php/SIG:Ontologies (checked 2008-04-30)

Papers