Stew and I met with ML about the XML markup project for German medical data. Coming out of the meeting:

• We want to move to doing markup as soon as possible.
• Stew and I will concoct a TEI schema within the next two weeks, along with a template, and mark up a couple of the documents as examples. The schema will provide all the constraints on e.g. attribute values (see below), which ensure standardization where required.
• ML will supply lists of the standardized values for key data fields.
• Where data is marked up in the document itself, there's no need to harvest and/or encode it in the header; only information not parsable from the document, or which is absent from the document and inferred from external sources, should be in the header. In other words, we should eliminate duplication, keeping documents lean and reducing the potential for error.
• Later processing can fill out the header with all metadata on the fly, if and when this is required.
• Editorial expansions will be marked up (they're currently in square brackets), but the underlying symbols expanded may not be; this policy needs to be set out in detail and explained.
• External lists of people, places etc. will be maintained, in separate XML files; document instances will point at these.
• Although the identifiers for elements in these lists will be finite, they may change; this will necessitate updates to the schema, since constraints on attributes for these values in the documents will be applied through the schema (for ease of editing). That places the onus for maintaining lists and schemas on Stew and myself, rather than on the content experts, which reduces the requirement for XML skills on the part of the latter.
• We'll meet again on June 16, at which point Stew and I will have our schema, template and examples ready.