[eXist-TEIXML] TEI Processing Model support in eXist

[Joe W. <jo...@gm...>]

Hello, all,

I hope you have all been well!  If you read Hugh Cayless's
announcement posted to TEI-L earlier this morning (below), you will
notice the information about the new Processing Model specification in
the TEI P5 Guidelines.  The Processing Model (PM) "permits the writer
of an ODD to specify how TEI elements might be processed for different
output formats."

Wolfgang Meier worked closely with the creators of PM to create an
implementation in eXist, the "TEI Processing Model Toolbox," which is
an app that you can install in eXist 3.0 RC1.  From the project
homepage, https://github.com/wolfgangmm/tei-simple-pm, this app
"facilitates the integration of the TEI processing model into existing
applications, supporting a range of different output media without
requiring advanced coding skills."  See the project homepage for more
info, including a great screenshot demo, links to live demos, and
installation.

I'd encourage everyone using TEI with eXist to check out the spec and
the app.  We're using it in the next revision of history.state.gov.
Specifically, we've adapted our homegrown XQuery-based TEI-to-HTML
stylesheets to a PM-enhanced ODD, and the app generates XQuery
stylesheets from the ODD.  It handles not only HTML output but PDF
(via XSL-FO and/or LaTeX) and EPUB.  It also gives you hooks to add
custom extension functions, should straight PM not provide adequate
functionality; we use this for generating tables of contents and other
complex transformations.

Best regards,
Joe

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hugh Cayless <phi...@gm...>
Date: Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 9:18 AM
Subject: Release 3.0.0
To: TE...@li...


The TEI Consortium has released the TEI P5 Guidelines version 3.0.0
(Codename: SPQR), dedicated to the memory of our dear colleague
Sebastian Rahtz. This version was the second since we switched over to
GitHub, and was an especially complex one because of major changes to
both the Guidelines and Stylesheets (see the release notes below for
details).

Syd Bauman and Elisa Beshero-Bondar were our release technicians,
assisted by James Cummings, Martin Holmes, and myself.

We encourage you all to report bugs and make feature requests via the
new GitHub site at https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues. Your input is
how we know what to work on, and we cannot do without it! All of the
TEI Consortium’s software projects are hosted at
https://github.com/TEIC and software issues should be reported at the
various projects there. The Guidelines are available from all the
usual places (such as the TEI website
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html and the
GitHub site https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/releases/tag/P5_Release_3.0.0).
A new release of the TEI Stylesheets has been made in conjunction with
the 3.0.0 release at
https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets/releases/tag/v7.41.0. The
oxygen-tei package is available at
https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/releases/tag/v5.0.0. The TEI Debian
package releases are still underway and will be available soon. The
TEI P5 version 3.0.0 release notes are appended below, and are also
linked from the footer of the online Guidelines
(http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/readme-3.0.0.html).

Hugh Cayless,
Chair, TEI Council


Release Notes:

This version of the TEI Guidelines is a major step forward, and thus
merits an increment of the major portion of the version number from 2
to 3. The significant changes that warrant this increment are twofold,
as follows. The first is the implementation of Pure ODD, which
replaces RELAX NG content models with TEI elements in the definitions
of new elements and attributes. This means that apart from Schematron
constraints, TEI is now defined entirely in TEI. The new specification
elements and their use are described in Chapter 22. The TEI
Stylesheets have been extensively modified to handle Pure ODD content
models.

The second is the introduction of the new Processing Model
specification in section 22.5.5. TEI Processing Models permit the
writer of an ODD to specify how TEI elements might be processed for
different output formats. Release 3.0.0 of the TEI Guidelines also
introduces other new features and resolves a number of issues raised
by the TEI community. As always, the majority of these changes and
corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by
the TEI community using the GitHub tracking system. If you find
something you think needs to change in the TEI Guidelines, schemas,
tools, or website, please submit a feature request or bug issue at
https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues for consideration. A full list of
the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found
under the 3.0.0 milestone.

Some of the notable changes other than the Processing Model and Pure
ODD in this release include:
 * The new msFrag element was added to permit Manuscript Descriptions
to contain virtual reconstructions of fragmented documents as well as
to analyse their components.
 * The new annotationBlock element was added to group together
linguistic annotations.
 * The new transcriptionDesc element was added to describe the set of
transcription conventions used, particularly for spoken material.
 * The oVar and pVar elements are no longer recommended; rather, use
of oRef and pRef is recommended instead. The attributes of oRef and
pRef have been adjusted to accommodate this usage.
 * The type attribute of stage now allows multiple values.
 * The TEI and table elements now claim membership in att.typed (and
thus gets the type and subtype attributes).
 * The hand attribute was removed from att.damaged, att.textCritical,
and att.transcriptional, and added to a new att.written class, to
which att.damaged, att.textCritical, att.transcriptional, ab, closer,
div, fw, head, hi, label, line, note, opener, p, salute, seg, text,
and zone belong.
 * The seg element was added to the content of notatedMusic.
 * The explanations and discussions of several features have been
improved, including:
   * the att.scoping attributes target and match
   * the attributes of att.datable.w3c the attRef element
   * the revisionDesc element
 * The display of element documentation has been re-ordered so that
notes and examples now precede the content models (given in both Pure
ODD and RELAX NG). And, of course, many typos were corrected.
 * In addition, improvements have been made to the XSL stylesheets
(which provide processing of TEI ODD files for Roma and OxGarage as
well as other TEI conversions). The Stylesheets are maintained
separately from the Guidelines and are at
https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets.

This release is dedicated to the memory of our colleague Sebastian
Rahtz (13 February 1955 – 15 March 2016). We are greatly diminished
without his generosity, wisdom, and humor. Release 3.0.0, however, has
a lot of him in it. He was the architect of the new Processing Model,
and had implemented most of the support for Pure ODD in the
Stylesheets. Unlike poets, the creators of software and living
standards generally don't get to make a monumentum aere perennius. At
best, we can hope that our work will be carried on, rewritten,
extended, and refactored. That process has already begun for
Sebastian's TEI Stylesheets, and they will continue to evolve to meet
the community's needs going forward; but they, and we, are
immeasurably better off for his contributions.


/**
 *  Hugh A. Cayless, Ph.D
 *  Chair, TEI Technical Council
 *  hug...@du...
 *  Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3)
 *  http://blogs.library.duke.edu/dcthree/
**/