TEI META Task Force: Report for Council meeting 27 Jan 04 [MEW09]

This report should be read in conjunction with the other reports at . It follows on from the report prepared for the 2003 members meeting (MEW 06), and uses the same section headings.

The META working group has not been functioning as well as had been hoped; it was expected that it could operate via email, but in practice work has been limited to some intense small face to face meetings, some email, and regular (argumentative) discussions between Lou Burnard and Sebastian Rahtz. A full face to face meeting was planned for October 2003, but did not finally take place.

The current timetable of work under the META umbrella is currently expected to be as follows: January 2004: freeze new ODD format, and hand over P5 sources in this form to TEI editors January 2004: alpha release of Pizza Chef replacement for ad hoc generation of schemas February 2004: first draft of new TEI module for tag documentation March/April 2004: first release of P5 with new/revised modules for manuscript descriptions, feature structures, characters, and linking.

Two very important activities which should start soon are Preparation of internationalized versions of the TEI schemas. Alejandro Bia has done the background work, and it now needs gluing into the Guidelines Linking of TEI elements to ISO terminology The groundwork has been laid for these in the ODD language, but implementation awaits.

Revision of ODDs

Few important changes have been made to the ODD markup language since November 2003. The most significant is the removal of a layer of indirection by which tagDecl elements pointed to tagDoc elements; the tagDocs have now been moved inline into the main chapters.

Conversion of the P4 ODD files to candidate P5 is now essentially complete, and waiting approval by the council; this is explained in more detail in MEW 07 and MEW 08. This does not mean that the format of the P5 ODD language is frozen, but that the current version is stable enough to use as a basis for further editing and transformation. It is recommended that the complex and fragile automated conversion from P4 format to P5 format should now be discontinued after a final run.

Many small changes have been made to the ODDs, mainly ironing out problems which emerge from DTD and Schema generation. The task of making all elements members of one of the TEI classes has begun, and some new classes have been defined, but much work remains for the Editors in this area.

An HTML version of the P5 Guidelines has been implemented, but has many problems. The PDF version has not yet been attempted.

New module for tag documentation

The revision of the TSD tagset (which documents the ODD language in which the TEI Guidelines are maintained) to turn it into a proper TEI module and to make it conform to the current Guidelines source, has been started, but is now waiting on the Editors to produce a candidate document for review.

Processors to generate schemas

The XSLT transforms, and associated tools, to produce the necessary schema and DTD outputs from the TEI sources are now deemed stable and ready for testing. Relax NG (XML and compact syntax), W3C Schema, and DTD are all generatable from the same source.

Datatypes

The simple automatic datatyping of attributes is complete. This is now waiting on the Editors to go over the remaining attributes and see which of them could benefit from datatyping.

Pizza chef rewrite

A new trial version of a replacement for the Pizza Chef, which encapsulates the process of generating schemas and DTDs in a web service, is called Roma and is ready for testing.