TEI META Task Force: Report to Council, 30 Mar 2004 [MEW11]
Contents
- Revision of ODDs
- New module for tag documentation
- Processors to generate schemas, etc
- Datatypes, and attributes
- Roma, and TEI extensions
- Internationalization
This report should be read in conjunction with the other reports at http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Workgroups/META/ . It follows on from the report prepared for the Council conference call on January 27th 2004 (MEW 09), and uses the same section headings.
- April 2004: release of P5 for TEI Council with new/revised modules for manuscript descriptions, feature structures, characters, and ODDs.
- May 2004: TEI Council meeting: presentation of ODD chapter of Guidelines, and proposals for restructuring of base/core modules
- June 2004: implementation of restructuring; implementation of ‘compiled’ mode for Roma
Revision of ODDs
Extensive changes have been made to the ODD language, culminating in a 2 day meeting on March 23/24th at which the details were discussed. All of these changes are now described in the draft chapter for the ODDs.
The automated conversion of P4 sources to P5 draft ODD language was run for the last time at the beginning of March, and editing is now taking place in the new ODD format. Two substantial upgrades of the language took place during March, but the P5 source is now fully self-validating (ie it creates a schema against which its source is valid).
The task of making all elements members of one of the TEI classes is ongoing. Much work remains for the Editors in this area.
The draft chapters for feature structures, manuscript description, and character encoding are now all converted to the current ODD language and are (more or less) valid. Testing of these to HTML, DTD and Schema is now being finished.
New module for tag documentation
The revision of the TEI Guidelines chapter which documents the ODD language is complete, though plenty of editorial cleanup and explanation is needed before the May Council meeting.
Processors to generate schemas, etc
The XSLT transforms, and associated tools, to produce the necessary schema and DTD outputs from the TEI sources are now stable again after a big rewrite. Relax NG XML and DTD are generatable from the P5 source; W3C Schema and Relax NG compact syntax are generated by post-processing using Roma. A small set of test files validates against both languages. This appears to be robust.
HTML versions of the P5 Guidelines can be generated, with a few problems. The PDF version has not yet been attempted.
Datatypes, and attributes
The Editors still have an action to go over all the attributes again and see which of them could benefit from more datatyping. They also have an action to see which should be transmogrified to child elements in order to contain full text.
Roma, and TEI extensions
The Roma replacement for the Pizza Chef, which encapsulates the process of generating schemas and DTDs in a web service, has been used by various people over the last few months. It had a major revision in February, and is now fairly stable.
There is a mailing list to discuss extensions but it has not had much life. However, the March META meeting in Paris spent a lot of effort on defining a new and powerful model for how to write extensions in ODD, which is now awaiting full implementation. TEI Lite, the Ibsen Project, the BNC, and the Lampeter Corpus are being used as test cases.
Internationalization
As part of the March META meeting in Paris, we looked at how to implement localized versions of the TEI names, either for language reasons or syntactic sugar. We decided that translating a tag name to another language should use the same mechanism as regarding <OrderedList> to be a view of <list type="ordered"> , and we realized we could use a single extension mechanism to cover all of this. This means that ‘Spanish TEI’ can be treated as a view of the TEI, just as TEI Lite is, and maintained as an ODD file. The next stage is to implement this using the translations Alejandro Bia has prepared, and make some language options part of Roma.