Development of language solutions based on TEI and ODD

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a vast, long standing and widely used encoding standard, covering different areas in the humanities. High quality documentation with many examples and active discussions on the rationale behind the available elements and attributes and their intended use are among the many qualities of the TEI. The TEI presents itself as guidelines, trying to cover as many areas and use-cases in the humanities as possible. The TEI is also designed to be customized for use in specific situations. Customization is achieved via a "One Document Does it all" (ODD). An ODD offers a mechanism to override, restrict, eliminate and extend (parts of) the guidelines in a documented way. ODD can be seen as a powerful abstraction layer from which validation, documentation, but also processing models can be generated. A nice, but complex feature of ODD is that they can be chained, enabling you to have focused ODD's and to promote reuse. In my work on corpora and dictionaries at the Fryske Akademy ODD is the basis from which I generate XSD, configuration, SQL, Java, bind.xml etc. In my presentation I will show you how we benefit from ODD in for example editing and publishing solutions, our goal being to enhance tool development and interoperability through standardization.