Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

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doday
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Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by doday »

My understanding is that TEI is more a set of guidelines than an actual format, and can basically be any SGML but has a specific XML format also. OSIS seems to be TEI-compliant or at least I seem to see OSIS XML files being referred to as TEI files in various places. Is there a list of formats that fall under / are compliant with TEI, etc.?

The OSIS manual states:
Users familiar with the Text Encoding Initiative will find OSIS markup quite familiar, because the bulk of the elements we define correspond directly to TEI elements, and almost always have the same name (though often simplified). The schema also provides a TEIform attribute for such elements, so they can be recognized by form-aware processors as equivalent to their TEI counterparts (p. 2).
To me this implies OSIS is similar, but not equivalent or necessarily compliant / a sub– or super– set. There also seems to be support for the TEI Header to retain it when TEI-encoded resources are encoded in OSIS (?):
The content of a teiHeader element is not processed as part of the OSIS schema. It is provided for cases where a TEI header file or portion of a text needs to accompany a text that is now being encoded in OSIS markup (p. 30).
So to be clear, my questions are as follows:
  1. Is OSIS a sub– (or super–) set of TEI or just a similar format?
  2. Are there other explicit formats used to store biblical corpora that are considered TEI-compliant (whether a sub/super–set)?
Dan O’Day
Kirk Lowery
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by Kirk Lowery »

I've passed on your question about OSIS to a couple members of the OSIS Technical Committee. I don't know if they're members of B-Greek, but I'll pass on any comments they might have. If not, then I'll do my poor best to answer.

Kirk
Kirk E. Lowery
doday
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by doday »

Thanks!
Dan O’Day
Ken M. Penner
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by Ken M. Penner »

Since I'm Secretary for the TEI Board of Directors, I really should know the answer to this question off the top of my head. But I'll have to get back to you after I look into it a bit.
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
Ken M. Penner
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by Ken M. Penner »

doday wrote: August 25th, 2022, 4:16 pm My understanding is that TEI is more a set of guidelines than an actual format, and can basically be any SGML but has a specific XML format also.
The TEI does publish a set of Guidelines, which make recommendations, which if treated as rules describe an encoding scheme or markup language. The current Guidelines are named P5 and specify XML encoding, but P1 (1990), P2 (1992), and P3 (1994) used SGML. P4 was the first to use XML.
doday wrote: August 25th, 2022, 4:16 pmIs there a list of formats that fall under / are compliant with TEI, etc.?
Not that I know of.
I suspect the precise descriptor for what you have in mind is TEI Conformance.
From the TEI P5 Guidelines:
23.4 Conformance wrote:A document is TEI-conformant if it:
is a well-formed XML document (23.4.1 Well-formedness Criterion)
can be validated against a TEI Schema, that is, a schema derived from the TEI Guidelines (23.4.2 Validation Constraint)
conforms to the TEI Abstract Model (23.4.3 Conformance to the TEI Abstract Model)
uses the TEI namespace (and other namespaces where relevant) correctly (23.4.4 Use of the TEI Namespace)
is documented by means of a TEI-conformant ODD file (23.4.5 Documentation Constraint) which refers to the TEI Guidelines
There could be any number of encoding schemes that use TEI-conformant subsets or supersets of the TEI guidelines. The TEI Guidelines permit the TEI schema to be extended, so supersets of the TEI encoding scheme can be readily defined.
doday wrote: August 25th, 2022, 4:16 pm To me this implies OSIS is similar, but not equivalent or necessarily compliant / a sub– or super– set.
The TEI Guidelines expect the TEI schema to be customized for each application.
doday wrote: August 25th, 2022, 4:16 pm
  1. Is OSIS a sub– (or super–) set of TEI or just a similar format?
  2. Are there other explicit formats used to store biblical corpora that are considered TEI-compliant (whether a sub/super–set)?
1. I get the impression that OSIS is a customization of the TEI encoding schema, so a sub- (or super-) set of TEI.
2. There probably are other customizations of the TEI encoding schema, but I think OSIS is the most well-developed and supported.
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
doday
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by doday »

Ken,

Thank you very much for your response! The only other format I've stumbled on that appears to be TEI-conformant is (X)CES.
Dan O’Day
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by Jonathan Robie »

OSIS is definitely the most widely-used TEI format for scripture. But USFM / USX are much more widely used in the translation world.

When you start doing fancy things like syntax trees and intense data integration, neither format is sufficient.

Can I ask what you are trying to do? It might help me give better advice. You use the word "Corpus". Because Bible translation mostly uses USFM/USX, those formats tend to be the sources for large, multilingual corpora. Hebrew and Greek texts are generally aligned to these translations, and are found in the same formats.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Ken M. Penner wrote: August 26th, 2022, 2:28 pm I suspect the precise descriptor for what you have in mind is TEI Conformance.
From the TEI P5 Guidelines:
23.4 Conformance wrote:A document is TEI-conformant if it:
is a well-formed XML document (23.4.1 Well-formedness Criterion)
can be validated against a TEI Schema, that is, a schema derived from the TEI Guidelines (23.4.2 Validation Constraint)
conforms to the TEI Abstract Model (23.4.3 Conformance to the TEI Abstract Model)
uses the TEI namespace (and other namespaces where relevant) correctly (23.4.4 Use of the TEI Namespace)
is documented by means of a TEI-conformant ODD file (23.4.5 Documentation Constraint) which refers to the TEI Guidelines
There could be any number of encoding schemes that use TEI-conformant subsets or supersets of the TEI guidelines. The TEI Guidelines permit the TEI schema to be extended, so supersets of the TEI encoding scheme can be readily defined.
And I think he is right to point out that TEI conformance does not mean interoperability with all other TEI applications. OSIS is an example of the right way to do this - create a group that agrees on a TEI-conformant way to exchange the data you care about.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
doday
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Location: Chicagoland, USA

Re: Question about relationship between TEI and other file formats for biblical corpora

Post by doday »

Thanks for the reiteration, Jonathan. Concerning your question about my goals, I am just seeking to understand the relationship between the two for now as I've been making a list of the various formats used related to biblical corpora.

For my own eventual purposes, I intend to store commentary about biblical texts in an effective way that can refer to single passages and ranges of passages, allows for custom versification mapped back to some standard (I'm using the St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint (SAAS) which uses the LXX OT but doesn't quite conform to other LXX versifications I've encountered), and makes it easy to display / use in existing tools (I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to sharing the data in a way that is useful in applications that show commentary along with biblical texts). It seems like OSIS supports this well, and I've also stumbled on some things like Scripture Burrito (but can't find a functional project or fully-developed example that displays content stored in this latter format, which I believe it refers to as the "parascriptural flavor"). I see you are on the committee for Scripture Burrito, but that is really a separate thread from this TEI/OSIS relationship discussion.
Dan O’Day
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