TEI NEH-funded Task Force on SGML to XML Migration

The TEI Task Force on SGML to XML Migration was chartered in May 2002 by the TEI Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and charged with developing recommendations for migrating existing TEI resources from SGML (P3) to XML (P4). The Task Force was comprised of representatives from projects with significant TEI SGML, along with selected technical experts and the TEI editors, and has attempted to document the methods and tools necessary to migrate legacy TEI data to XML.

The members of the Task Force met three times — in October 2002 in Chicago (immediately following TEI Annual Members Meeting), in February 2003 at the University of Maryland, and in June 2003 at the University of Alicante. Minutes from each of the meetings are available below, as is a detailed workplan written after the first meeting.

The primary deliverables of the Task Force are two reports, Strategic Considerations in Migration of TEI Documents from SGML to XML and the Practical Guide to Migration of TEI Documents from SGML to XML. The first report, intended for administrators and project managers, emphasizes the planning and decision-making involved in data migration, while the second report describes the mechanics of conversion in greater detail and is written primarily for the technical staff who will implement the conversion. The specific recommendations in the technical report are augmented by a set of Migration Case Study Reports that discuss individual migration efforts undertaken by members of the Task Force.

Below are links to the documents produced by the Task Force — final reports, along with meeting minutes and other working papers. The information presented here is current as of June 2004; however the Task Force has fulfilled its charter and does not expect to update these materials after 01 July 2004.

Documents and Resources Primary Deliverables MI W 02 MI W 03 MI W 06 Other Resources Software tools folder: Provides links and descriptions for some of the tools described in the reports and case studies. Samples directory: Contains the sample files submitted by the repository representatives, which are the raw materials for the case studies. Technical Checklist for TEI/SGML documents: A checklist for users to use in assessing the complexity of their migration before they begin. Minutes, Working Papers, Reports paper , a paper by various task force members given at LREC'04. Proc. of the Fourth Intl. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation, p. 139–142, ELRA, Paris, 2004: PDF MI M 08 MI M 07 MI W 05 MI M 01 ED W 76 Draft Task Force Charge

Task Force Members Syd Bauman (ex officio) Alejandro Bia Lou Burnard (ex officio) Tomaž Erjavec Jessica Hekman Tobias Rischer Chris Powell Chris Ruotolo (chair) Susan Schreibman Natasha Smith John Walsh Sarah Wells (technical writer) Franz Wiering