Creation and Display of Multi-Schema-Customizations (paper)
Peter Stadler* Peter Stadler is a musicologist and computational linguist by training and an enthusiastic digital humanist. Currently, he is research associate at the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe at Paderborn University, Germany, in charge of the digital edition of Weber’s letters, diaries and writings. He was Co-Initiator and Co-Convenor of the TEI Correspondence SIG from 2008 to 2016 and has been an elected member of the TEI Technical Council since 2014.
1As with the TEI itself, large TEI projects might find it advisable to create specific customizations for subprojects while keeping a common core. One common way is to create a project customization that serves as a base, deriving all subproject customizations from there. A prominent example for this top down workflow by chaining of ODDs (Burnard 2016) is the German Text Archive (DTA), which maintains one “ODD file for the complete DTA ‘base format’ tagset”1 and then separate, subsetting ODD files for prints and manuscripts.23
2An alternative bottom-up-approach is taken by the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe (WeGA). Here, the common specifications are maintained in specification groups (<specGrp>), allowing all subproject customizations to cherry pick the relevant groups by <specGrpRef>s. One great advantage of this approach is that it’s also possible to abstract TEI and non-TEI specification groups for attributes, datatypes and macros. E.g., the WeGA defines an attribute class att.wega.rend which is used for TEI elements as well as MEI elements; the macro wega.data.temporal.iso defines values for both TEI attributes @when, @notBefore, etc. as well as for MEI attributes @isodate, @notafter (no camel case!), etc.4
3Nevertheless, the WeGA recently introduced a wega_all schema, a virtual aggregate of all the subproject schemas. The specifications in this superset serve as a target for the <gi> elements in the common project Guidelines, ensuring the presence of a specification without specifying a schema. The spec page for every element (and class, etc.) then features links to alternative spec pages for every subproject schema where appropriate. Figure 1 shows the current development version of the WeGA Guidelines spec page: the row labeled “Other Customizations” provides the information whether there are other subproject schemas incorporating the element byline and whether their specification differs from the current schema.
Figure 1. WeGA Guidelines Spec Page.
