Objectives

1. Review the status of current TEI Recommendations for handling stand-off or out-of-line markup.
2. Review the TEI extended pointer syntax with respect to current needs and practices.
3. Review the TEI linking and hypertext recommendations with respect to current needs and practices.
4. Review the needs and practices of those parts of the TEI user community likely to use such facilities. In particular, the needs and practices of the following communities should be considered:
   • applied linguists representing multiple levels or layers of analysis of a corpus;
   • social scientists, historians, descriptive linguists and others creating and archiving multimodal resources (oral history, video, transcripts, etc.)
   • applied linguists attempting integrated analyses of multimodal communication (involving speech, writing, gesture, movement etc.)
   • philologists and interpretive critics recording multiple interpretations of a single written text;
   • translators and others working with multilingual corpora;
   • authors and encoders of documents that include cross-references, indexes, and other hypertextual features;
   • encoders who need to represent existing hypertext documents in TEI format.
5. Review the facilities provided in this area by standards which have appeared since the publication of P3, in particular applications based on the W3C Xlink and Xpointer standards, such as :
   • ISLE
   • MATE
   • Annotation Graphs
   • Talkbank
6. Propose a detailed work plan (possibly involving further work groups), to improve and extend upon the Recommendations provided by TEI P4 in these areas. The work plan will be determined by agreement of the working group but is expected to address at least the following:
   • convergence of the TEI Extended Pointer Syntax with current and forthcoming W3C recommendations for XLink;
   • case-studies and best practice recommendations for use of TEI linkage and alignment procedures in the domains mentioned above;
   • definition of cross-walk mappings, as needed, amongst other current standards in this area, using TEI as an inter-language
   • development of example code that performs appropriate TEI processing for the adjusted recommendations. This could include development of XSLT stylesheets, or the adaptation of other already existing tools, as determined by the working group.
7. Respond to comments on the relevant portions of TEI P4 routed to this work group by the editors.

Administrative

The head of the work group is David Durand, who should propose an initial membership as soon as possible, for ratification by the TEI Council at its next meeting. The TEI Editors are ex officio members of all TEI Work Groups. Other constraints and procedures applicable to all TEI Work Groups are described in document TEI ED W54.

The group has a budget of USD 8000 for the year ending 31 Dec 2002, during which one meeting is authorized.

The Work group is required to provide progress reports on its work regularly to the TEI Technical Council, which has authority for approving all technical output from the work group.

The work group will meet regularly by conference call, and will communicate by mailing list. Part of the initial decision-making on the work plan will be a choice between two forms of face-to-face meeting; either as a kick-off to the work of the group, or as working meeting to make progress on difficult technical issues once the group is underway.

Deadlines