Dear all, In principle, TEI gives recommendations about how to encode a text according to function and not according to information content. That is, a name element <name> is used to mark that a certain piece of text is used as a name. The element is not a statement about the outside world, e.g., that there is or was a person with this name at the time the text was written or at some other point in time. However, such a pure functional encoding is often unsatisfactory and many users want to use the TEI-elements to mark up information content as well. There seems to be a trend that more and more ontological information is included in the TEI, e.g. the inclusion of the elements from the MASTER-project in TEI P5. We in our project found TEI to restrictive back in 1992 when we started large scale encoding of content information in archaeological texts, see http://www.dok.hf.uio.no/artikler/arkeologi/documenting%20two%20histories.pd... http://www.dok.hf.uio.no/artikler/arkeologi/jordal_caa2004.pdf However, I think one should not add semantic tags on an ad hoc basis. Semantic or ontological mark up is always done according to an explicit or implicit ontological model. Perhaps mostly according to some not extremely well defined idea about the world. At the TEI annual meeting a SIG for TEI and ontologies was established, see http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/. I volunteered to try to identify ontologically oriented elements in the TEI P4-5. Personally I would like to use the cultural heritage concept model (CRM) developed in the SIG/Working group under ICOM/CIDOC. Please, have a look at http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/ for the ICOM/CIDOC reference concept model (CRM). Kind regards Christian-Emil Ore At 12:13 22.04.2005, Georg Vogeler wrote: Dear Howard Batchelor, may I draw your attention to the Charters Encoding Iniative (http://www.cei.lmu.de)? Scholars working with medieval and early modern charters discuss an enlargement of the TEI definitions for this kind of material. In our view your interest in the material culture might be satisfied by using indexing-tags (like <index> or an specialised <res>-element we would like to introduce in the TEI) that can distinguish between the given word in the will and some regularised words as an attribute. I would be very interested to hear more about your project as you have rightly emphasised the multiple relevance of the wills as documents of material culture as well as documents of believe, of legal concepts etc. Best wishes Georg Vogeler On 21 Apr 2005 at 12:10, Howard Batchelor wrote to TEI-L@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU:
TEI members:
Has any TEI-based project ever considered the problem of marking up medieval wills or deeds of gift in such a way as to support extraction of information about material culture in general, but especially books and other possessions indicating the interests and tastes of the owner? The primary objective is to create a schema closely based on standard TEI practices that would support tracking of manuscript works in particular, but the documents also contain information about other possessions that may interest historians.
Advice from anyone with comparable experience would be greatly appreciated.
Howard Batchelor UCLA Digital Library Coordinator howardb@library.ucla.edu 310.825.7657
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