TEI Processing Model for Non-TEI Documents (paper)
Magdalena Turska* Magdalena Turska is a software developer at eXist Solutions and an elected member of the TEI Consortium’s Technical Council. She has recently completed her DiXiT Marie Curie experienced researcher fellowship at IT Services, University of Oxford where she was a member of the TEI Simple project and one of the authors of TEI Processing Model. She was a co-editor of the Corpus Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts and Correspondence. She teaches advanced TEI encoding, XSLT and XQuery and often helps projects with data modeling and application design. and Wolfgang Meier* Wolfgang Meier is the founder and lead developer of the eXist-db open source project and director of eXist Solutions GmbH, which was created by community members to better support professional users of eXist-db. Besides working on eXist-db for 16 years, he has developed a number of related tools, including the TEI Publisher, an implementation of the TEI Processing Model. He has contributed to a large number of international academic and commercial projects during the past years.
1TEI Processing Model (TEI PM), recently integrated into TEI Guidelines is an
abstraction layer which provides means of specifying the intended transformations
for TEI elements with the TEI ODD metalanguage.
2Bespoke transformations for a range of output formats, such as HTML, PDF, LaTeX,
or ePUB, pose significant challenges when it comes to their creation, maintenance
and assuring consistency across formats. TEI PM addresses these difficulties
allowing for single-source publishing also when it comes to authoring
transformation rules in TEI ODD.
3TEI Publisher, the TEI PM implementation, offers an out-of-the-box publishing of
TEI documents leveraging eXist-db’s potential as web server and application
framework. Following the principle of ODD (one document does it all) it hides
several layers of complexity required to publish TEI texts still leaving the editors
full control over their data and transformation process. TEI Publisher’s application
generator can be used to create a freestanding app covering all core features like
browsing, search and transformation into various formats.
4Recent addition to the TEI Publisher explore the potential of using the TEI
Processing Model as a general-purpose XML transformation language, not limited to
TEI documents. Since schemas for non-TEI vocabularies can be easily expressed in
TEI ODD, what follows is that the TEI Processing Model can become the XML
Processing Model with some adjustments to the Processing Model implementation
freeing it from its dependency on the TEI schema and ODD.
5While TEI Processing Model is a major selling point for non-academic users
adopting TEI into their workflow to encode large textual corpora it is interesting to
see how the process can equally work the other way around and TEI Processing
Model can be applied to other XML vocabularies.