SIG:Ontologies

Introduction
In May and June 2004, there was a discussion on the TEI mailing list about prosopographical tags. This lead to a suggestion that detailed information about persons (physical and legal), dates, events, places, objects etc. and their interpretation could be marked up outside the text, and that this could be connected in on-going ontology work being done e.g. in the Museum community, such as the Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOK-CRM). The result of this was the establishment of a Ontologies SIG at the 4th annual members meeting of TEI in October 2004.

The SIG runs a mailing list on this topic. To join, send a message to tei-ontology-sig-request@lists.sourceforge.net with the word SUBSCRIBE in the header or the body of the email.

The SIG is convened by Øyvind Eide, of the Unit for Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo, and Christian-Emil Ore, of the Unit for Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo, who is also the chair of The International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CIDOC).

Open meeting on June 15 2005
The TEI Ontologies SIG held an open meeting during the ACH/ALLC Conference in Victoria, Canada, on June 15, 2005. Six persons were participating.

Introduction
In the minutes from the lest meeting, two groups of tasks were set up:

1. Tasks the conveners promised to do in 2004 and 2005

2. Tasks we agreed should be done, but with no appointed person responsible

The tasks in group 1 are all on-going or finished, while of the tasks in group 2, only the identification of elements in TEI with "ontological relevance" (more on this expression below) is started.

Motivation
As a motivation for his interest in this work, Øyvind Eide described a project in which an analysis of relationships between person name elements in a TEI document was modeled in CIDOC-CRM. This work was discussed by the group, together with some aspects of the CIDOC-CRM model.

The group agreed on the general idea that there are things, such as relationships between persons, that should be modeled outside TEI, but with a possibility for links to TEI documents.

Identification of TEI element
This item was presented to the group as "Identifying TEI elements of special ontological interest". This initiated a discussion, because the group rejected the wording. Several other phrases were suggested to replace "special ontological interest", among them "extra-textual (ontological) interest" and "references to the physical world". None of these truly covers what we want to express, though.

Nevertheless, there were an common general understanding about what kind of elements we were talking about: Elements such as names, date and performances of plays, while elements such as italics, stanza and paragraphs are outside the scope of this SIG.

Time did not permit any actual investigation into which elements in TEI are of interest.

The on-going work in the FRBR/CIDOC-CRM Harmonization Group was discussed. It was argued that the TEI community should be involved in this work.

2005-08-01 Øyvind Eide