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10 July 2013

CodeSharing API Launched

Lead Programmer Martin Holmes introduced his new CodeSharing API at the Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School 2013, via an address entitled CodeSharing: A Simple API for Disseminating our TEI Encoding.
MoEML is proud to be the test case for Martin’s API, which was inspired in part by our quest to discover how other projects were using the TEI to encode historical dates. Since encoding is a critical practice involving many global and local decisions about the nature of a text, projects need to be able to cite other’s tagging practices to contextualize and justify their own encoding practices. This API, running on our project and other projects, would increase by many orders of magnitude the number of examples available for study, comparison, and citation. If you want to know how, how often, and in what context MoEML uses any TEI element, attribute, or attribute value, search the CodeSharing service running on MoEML. We ourselves also find the service helpful in training our RAs and in searching for (and correcting) lingering bits of legacy code. In conjunction with project documentation, this tool is a powerful help in achieving high encoding standards across a large project.
Abstract for Martin’s paper at Oxford:
Although the TEI Guidelines are full of helpful examples, and other initiatives such as TEI By Example have made great progress in providing more access to samples of text-encoding to help beginners get started, there is no doubt that one of the biggest obstacles to encoders at many levels is finding out how other scholars and projects have chosen to encode a particular feature or use a specific tag or attribute. Many projects now share their XML code, but that in itself is only marginally helpful; it can take substantial time to sift through the XML code in a large project to find what you’re looking for. At the same time, many other projects do not provide any access to their XML encoding. This talk presents a simple specification for an Application Programming Interface, along with a sample implementation written in XQuery and designed for the eXist XML database, providing straightforward access both for applications and end-users to sample code from any TEI project. The API is modelled on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a mechanism designed to allow archival search tools to ingest metadata from repositories.
The brief is also available.
Click here to read Martin’s documentation for The CodeSharing Protocol for TEI Markup Version 1.0.