TEI 2017 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada November 11 - 15

XML Sat Nov 11, 09:00–16:30
Sun Nov 12, 09:00–16:30

eXist-db and TEI Processing Model: Better together (workshop)

Magdalena Turska* Magdalena Turska is a software developer at eXist Solutions and an elected member of the TEI Consortium’s Technical Council. She has recently completed her DiXiT Marie Curie experienced researcher fellowship at IT Services, University of Oxford where she was a member of the TEI Simple project and one of the authors of TEI Processing Model. She was a co-editor of the Corpus Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts and Correspondence. She teaches advanced TEI encoding, XSLT and XQuery and often helps projects with data modeling and application design. and Wolfgang Meier* Wolfgang Meier is the founder and lead developer of the eXist-db open source project and director of eXist Solutions GmbH, which was created by community members to better support professional users of eXist-db. Besides working on eXist-db for 16 years, he has developed a number of related tools, including the TEI Publisher, an implementation of the TEI Processing Model. He has contributed to a large number of international academic and commercial projects during the past years.

1A significant portion of humanities research data is marked up and stored as XML documents. It is a logical choice to use a database which is optimized for the handling of XML documents when building an interface to publish and query the data. eXist-db is one of the leading native XML databases currently available. This open source solution is becoming a technology of choice in Digital Humanities, especially when it comes to storing, querying and publishing large corpora of XML marked up texts. eXist-db though is much more than just a database: it is also an application platform, web server and even a document creation platform. Furthermore, the TEI Publisher for eXist-db is currently the only one out-of-the-box implementation of the TEI processing model. Together they form a technology stack extremely well suited to be a rapid application development and publishing solution of choice both for large, established collaborative projects and individual researchers alike.
2This tutorial aims for a mix of talks and hands-on practical sessions. It will be divided in two parts, lasting a day each, which can be taken independently. Part one will provide basic introduction to eXist-db and follow on to querying data collections with XPath and XQuery to provide sound introduction to technologies necessary to query, extract, and manipulate XML documents as well as build applications for eXist-db. Part two will discuss options for publishing XML documents (including non-TEI ones) with the TEI Processing Model. As a source of inspiration and a panorama of applications that could benefit from relying on eXist-db as its core technology we will also showcase some research projects using eXist-db and TEI Processing Model. As eXist-db is fully based upon Open Standards and Open Source it is a future-proof and sustainable choice for research projects. Since its inception in 2001, eXist-db development has always been driven by the needs of a large user community. We believe that the TEI conference is a good opportunity for scholars to meet eXist-db contributors and practitioners, and to exchange ideas how the DH community could both engage and benefit further from eXist-db and TEI Publisher development.