Experiments with ODD outside the TEI framework Laurent Romary & Piotr Banski The ISO-TEI connection

Background Editing several ISO documents using TEI ODD – An ideal test bed for experimenting with the use of the TEI specification framework for non-TEI vocabulary – Existing collaboration agreement (cf. joint publication of the feature structure module) An existing infrastructure to this end – 2-year project between Oxford and ISO to provide round-trip tools between MSWord (OOXML) and TEI – Integrated in OxGarage and XSLT deliveries

The ISO use case ISO technical committee 37 – Terminology and language resources SC 3: computer application in terminology SC 4: management of language resources ISO document are highly structured objects – Introduction, 1 Scope, 2 Normative references, 3 Terms and Definition, …, Bibliography, Annexes (normative, Informative) ISO documents are just textual objects – Edited as word documents, published as pdf – Difficulty with ISO standards defining XML vocabularies

Our ISO workflow Development TEI/ODD Dissemination OOXML (docx) OOXML (docx) ISO comment template) Balloting and comments XSLT Proofreading From member bodies Editing by An ODD guru Copy-editing at ISO/CS PDF Publication

A variety of standards ISO/TC 37/SC 3 – TMF – Terminology Markup Framework – ongoing revision – TBX – Terminology Exchange Formats – ongoing revision ISO/TC 37/SC 4 – MLIF – multilingual information framework – MAF – Morphosyntactic Annotation Framework – TimeML – Temporal annotation

Are we happy with this? Pros – Powerful editing platform Full coverage of ISO needs (structure constraints, terminology) All TEI facilities (bibliography, cross-references, element specification with inline descriptions) – Very coherent output Consequence of semantically based editing – Perfect match between specification and documentation DTD, RelaxNG, W3C

Are we happy with this? Cons – A game for geeks? Steep learning curve limiting the number of possible editors… – Mastering TEI, ODD, SVN (XSLT) Difficult for ISO to take this up (limited technical awareness) – Limited support Seb, Seb, Seb… – No round trip (comments) – [Guess what is missing here?]

Are we happy with this? TEI/ODD as a specification platform is well adapted to such standardization activities – No extra features needed – Data typing facilities for further constraints (e.g. ) – A final product which is +one+ document accompanied by +one+ schema

Going further – defining families of formats Use case: TBX (Terminology exchange formats) A variety of needs – From simple bilingual glossaries to complex terminological entries (e.g. TermSciences, IATE) – community and industry requirement to have clearly identified customizations TBX-all, TBX-basics, TBX4TEI ;-) Typical use case: interoperability of translators’ workbenches Seen this somewhere already?

Using ODD to duplicate the TEI architecture A global marketplace of XML objects – Master ODD file Further flavours as additional ODD customizations – Taking seriously – Q: is this implemented? Has anyone used this seriously already? Taking up and customizing specific TEI components – Header, bibliography, cross-references, gramGrp

Implications for the future of ODD A pragmatic strategy for the evolution of ODD – Identify features needed to provide, step by step, a more coherent framework – Implement tools, anticipating needed support A coherent theory to understand what we are doing – Not part of this talk, but part of my hidden agenda Do we need to go to P6 for this? – ODD is already a strong basis for work – We need to manage transition