Since the mid 1990s there has been an increase in the interest for the design and use of conceptual models (ontologies) in humanities computing and library science, as well as in knowledge engineering in general. There is also a wish to use such models to enable information interchange. TEI has in its 20 years of history concentrated on the mark up of functional aspects of texts and their parts. That is, a person name is marked but linking to information about the real world person denoted by that name was not in the main scope. The scope of TEI has gradually broadened, however, to include more real world information external to the text in question. The Master project (Master 2001) is an early example of this change. In TEI P5 a series of new elements for marking up real world information are introduced and several such elements from the P4 are adjusted. TEI P5 is meant to be a set of guidelines for the encoding of a large variety of texts in many cultural contexts. Thus the set of real world oriented elements in TEI P5 should not formally be bound to a single ontology. The ontological part of TEI P5 is, however, close connected to the authors implicit world view. Thus we believe it is important to study this part of TEI P5 with some well defi ned ontology as a yardstick. Our long experience with memory institution sector makes CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) a natural choice. CIDOC CRM (Crofts 2005) has been proven useful as an intellectual aid in the formulation of the intended scope of the elements in a new mark up schemes and we believe the model can be useful to clarify the ontological part of TEI. This will also clarify what is needed in order to harmonize it with major standards like CIDOC CRM, FRBR, EAD and CDWA Lite.

Username
Password