In May and June 2004, there was a discussion on the TEI mailing list about prosopographical tags. This led to a suggestion that detailed information about persons (physical and legal), dates, events, places, objects etc. and their interpretation could be marked up outside the text, and that this could be connected to on-going ontology work being done e.g. in the Museum community, such as the Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM). The result of this was the establishment of a Ontologies SIG at the 4th annual members meeting of TEI in October 2004.

The SIG runs a mailing list on this topic. To join, send a message to tei-ontology-sig-request@lists.sourceforge.net with the word SUBSCRIBE in the header or the body of the email.

The main channel of information for the SIG is the WIKI.

The SIG is convened by Øyvind Eide, of the Unit for Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo, and Christian-Emil Ore, of the Unit for Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo, who is also the chair of The International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CIDOC).