A Formal Ontology for the Text Encoding Initiative

Abstract

This article presents the rationale and the proposal of a preliminary architecture of a formal ontology of the Text Encoding Initiative markup language. The reasons to have a formal and machine-readable semantics for TEI are manifold. In the first place, it would have a number of pragmatic and technical benefits, like better support for semantic interoperability in text encoding practices, easier cross-corpora query processing, seamless integration with Linked Open Data ecosystem. In second place, it would give a formalized account of the quasi-formal notion of the TEI abstract model, fostering the consistency and soundness of the TEI model. Given the complexity of the TEI encoding schema, such an ontology must necessarily have a very complex architecture, and its thorough definition will be a time consuming intellectual activity: in a first stage, we propose to limit its scope to a well-defined subdomain of the TEI, and to build it adopting pre-existing meta-ontology like EARMARK. The final part of the article gives some preliminary details of this design