Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

Maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.

The TEI is an extensive markup language for textual materials. It is organized into “modules”—groups of markup elements that apply to different types of texts such as dictionaries and critical apparatuses, or features to be flagged within a text, such as names/dates/people places and tables/formulae/graphics. Elements in the TEI appear for both syntactic markup (pages, paragraphs, etc.) and semantic markup (names, places, etc.). TEI implementers typically use customized DTDs, W3C XML Schemas, or RelaxNG schemas to define the subset of the entire TEI language for use in a given project. The online Roma tool allows TEI implementers to generate these customized schemas for local use. In addition to the markup defined for full texts, the TEI includes a header for metadata about the text itself. TEI was first released in 1994. The current version of the TEI is known as P5.