Conformance

TEI conformance

[ NOTE: This page is purely for discussion purposes. It does not reflect the policy of the TEI Consortium]

A document may claim TEI conformance according to 5 types. Each document should contain a link in its metadata pointing to a TEI Conformance Statement (TCS) which must provide the following information

1. contact information for the document owner
2. a URL or URLs for the schema(s) to which the document claims conformance (this is distinct from any formal link in the document itself used by validating software)
3. a URL for the ODD specification of the schema, if it is not one of the existing TEI exemplars

Where possible, the TCS should be a section within the metadata of the current document, but may also point to any publicly-available web document.

The conformance types are as follow. Thetre is a universal exception for any modification, that the TEI namespace may not be omitted or changed, the <TEI> element may not be removed, and the <teiHeader> element may not be removed.

1. The document conforms to the tei_all schema, or any valid subset of that (ie with fewer elements, tighter datatyping etc); with the exception that the TEI namespace may not be omitted or changed, the <TEI> element may not be removed, and the <teiHeader> element may not be removed.
   1. The definition of elements may be suppressed, so deleting the associated elements from the modified schema.
   2. The name (generic identifier) associated with an element may be changed, while preserving the semantics of the element. Note, however, that the new name may not clash with the default name of any element defined in these Guidelines.
   3. An <equiv> element in the ODD should be used to specify the TEI name for such renamed elements.
   4. Those parts of the content model of an element which are specified by classes may be extended by adding members to the classes.
   5. Further attributes, together with their names and types, may be specified for an individual element and existing attributes for an individual element may be renamed. Note that the new names may not clash with names of existing attributes for the element.
   6. Further attributes, together with their names and types, may be specified for the elements in a particular class and those inheriting characteristics from that class.
   7. Any derivation from the tei_all schema must be expressed in an accompanying ODD specification
2. The document conforms to a schema which adds new elements to the TEI but provides an ODD specification which uses the <equiv> mechanism which explains how to map these to unchanged TEI
3. The document conforms to a schema which extends the TEI element set by manipulation of the TEI class system, or extends the content model model of TEI elements to allow elements from other namespaces

There are three separate ways in which documents can be TEI compatible without being conformant:

1. The document conforms to a schema which is based on the TEI but has changed the content model for elements so that normal TEI documents would no longer conform
2. The document uses the TEI elements in the TEI namespace, but embeds them within another schema

Documents which use TEI names for elements but do not use the TEI namespace are regarded only as TEI-like.

In addition to the conformance type, a document may claim AACR compatibility if the elements <TEI> or <teiCorpus>, <teiHeader> and the child elements <title>, <sourceStmt> and <publicationStmt> in the header are retained in the schema.