Workgroups

The main purpose of a TEI Workgroup is to formally recommend extensions or modifications to the TEI Guidelines. Workgroups are not the only mechanism for proposing extensions or modifications to the Guidelines. Council decided at its meeting in April 2008 in Galway to rely on SIGs when possible in order to involve a broader community of users. Furthermore, users of the TEI are always welcome to submit feature requests and bug reports through SourceForge.

The following workgroups are currently active under the aegis of the TEI Council:

GIS Workgroup

  • This group was charged in January 2024 to provide standards-informed mechanisms that are at least interchangeable, if not interoperable, for encoding geographic information in TEI that are capable of unambiguous interpretation and transformation to and from standard GIS file formats.

TEI Stylesheets Task Force

  • This group was charged in March 2022 with rewriting the current set of XSLT stylesheets that tackle ODD processing for generation of schemas and documentation. It is aimed at converting ODD to the TEI Guidelines, schemas, and customization ODDs into schemas and customized output.

Internationalization (I18n) Workgroup

  • This group was charged in March 2020 with communicating the TEI to a multilingual user community. This comprises the development of a) internationalized and localized landing pages for the TEI site, b) a multilingual glossary of TEI terminology for both translators and users, and c) a curated repository of multilingual and multicultural examples.

The following workgroups have concluded their activity:

Text Directionality Workgroup

    • This group tasked by the TEI Council with developing a new section for the Guidelines on recommendations for encoding a variety of textual features related to text directionality and orientation.

TEI Pointer/Stand-off Markup Working Group

    • The TEI Pointer/Stand-off Markup Working Group (Gabriel Bodard, Martin Holmes, Piotr Bański, Laurent Romary, Syd Bauman, and Hugh Cayless) will eventually propose to TEI Technical Council that the specifications of the various pointer and XPointer methods in the Guidelines be improved, both (a) by the addition of concrete examples of the use of TEI pointer and other schemes, and some guidance as to which are appropriate in different contexts (and indeed in combination), and (b) by technical description, including examples, of precisely what an implementation of the TEI pointer schemes is expected to do.

Task Force for TEI Tite

  • This group (Kevin Hawkins, Perry Trolard, and Greg Suprock) was charged in September 2010 with realigning the version of Tite used by Apex CoVantage with the canonical version maintained in SourceForge and overseeing ongoing evolution of Tite. Proposals are being made in SourceForge.

Ad-hoc committee on TEI for Google Books

    • This group (James Cummings, Martin Holmes, Kevin Hawkins, and Laurent Romary) was charged in September 2011 with providing guidance to an engineer from Google who is working on adding TEI as an export format for Google Books. Its work was taken over by the TEI sub-group of the Google Library Quality working group (composed of representatives of Google's Library Partners).

Ad-hoc Committee on Encoding of Bibliographic Citations

    • This subgroup of the Council (Martin Holmes, Kevin Hawkins, and Laurent Romary) was charged in February 2010 with writing a proposal to make it clear how to use biblScope for various types of bibliographic citations. The committee has expanded its mission to include a clarification on recommended use of bibl, biblStruct, and biblFull and their child elements. It completed its work in March 2013.

Personography Workgroup

    • Chartered in January 2006; chaired by Matthew Driscoll.

Physical Bibliography Workgroup

    • Chartered in May 2004; chaired by Murray McGillivray.

Character Encoding Workgroup

    • Chaired by Christian Wittern; completed its recommendations in January 2005.

Feature Structures Workgroup

    • A joint activity with ISO/TC 37/SC 4 to revise the two chapters of the Guidelines on feature structures and propose a version of these chapters as ISO 24610; completed its work in October 2005.

Metalanguage Workgroup

    • Tasked to produce recommentatiosn on the XML vocabulary and other mechanisms used to encode the Guidelines. Chaired by Sebastian Rahtz; completed tasks in February 2005.

Migration Workgroup

    • Tasked to produce recommendations on conversion of legacy TEI data from SGML to XML. Chaired by Chris Ruotolo; completed tasks in January 2005.

Stand-Off Markup Workgroup

    • Chaired by David Durand.

Manuscript Description Task Force

  • Completed December 2005.