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Text
Encoding Initiative
The Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) is one of the oldest Metadata
standard. Started in 1987, TEI becomes "an international
and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums,
publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds
of literary and linguistic texts for online research and
teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive
and minimally obsolescent." The new TEI Consortium
was set up in December 2000 to continue maintaining and
developing the TEI standard. TEI mainly focuses on the
exchange of textual information, but other formats such
as image and sound are also addressed.
One of the main characteristics of TEI is
that its descriptive metadata is created as the header
(known as TEI header) of the encoded file (known as the
TEI text proper). The format of TEI encoding scheme is
based on the SGML standard. The TEI header has four major
parts: ,
,
,
,
each of which contains a hierarchical set of description
using TEI tags. TEI text also includes a set of tags.
All the TEI tags are defined in TEI DTD (Data Type Definition).
When TEI was designed, it was expected that
the producers of the textual digital data would create
the encoding data for the files at the same time. In fact
the TEI is very complicated, and the TEI
Guidelines encompass some 1300 pages of information.
It requires the metadata producer fully understanding
the TEI scheme and tags for particular types of text.
To make their work easy, a useful basic tag set was selected
from the several hundred SGML elements and defined by
the full TEI scheme, which contains the most needed elements.
Since many texts marked up according to the TEI guidelines
are based on printed books for which AACR2R/MARC catalog
records exist, in many cases header data is created or
reviewed and revised by librarians.
There is a widely usage of TEI in the world.
For example, The Electronic Text Centers at the University
of Virginia and the University of Michigan have used TEI
Lite to encode their holdings. TEI Website also maintains
a list of projects using TEI encoding scheme.
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