[tei-council] building a robust and flexible platform for the collaborative exploration and curation of TEI data?

[stuart yeates]

While I have many minor quibbles with Martin's post, I'd like to step 
back and make three observations and suggest two constructive steps.

Observations:

(1) I believe pretty much every member of the TEI community agrees with 
him, at least in principal.

(2) If we are to launch such an initiative, I believe we need to make 
it, from the outset, as attractive to multiple resourcing streams as 
possible (JISC-type central funders; individual contributions from 
humanities researchers; library consortia; computer scientists looking 
for interesting problems; etc).

(3) From a software engineering point of view, it seems vanishingly 
unlikely that we can build such a thing from scratch, even in the most 
benevolent funding environment imaginable.

Constructive steps:

(A) Survey, across all the disciplines that the TEI supports, what 
people's priorities are, what tools they are using and where they get 
their funding from. [Some carefully survey design will be needed to 
avoid people ranking everything as 'must haves']

(B) Build a list of tools that people are already using, what they're 
using them for and what formats those tools support.

 From there, we can make intelligent decisions about which tools to 
build a framework on.

cheers
stuart
-- 
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/