One Document Does-it-all (ODD): a language for documentation, schema generation, and customization from the Text Encoding Initiative

TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative, was founded in 1987 to develop guidelines for encoding machine-readable texts of interest to the humanities and social sciences. The TEI is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs several mailing lists, holds an annual conference, and maintains an eponymous technical standard, an online journal, a wiki, a GitHub repository, and a toolchain. The TEI Guidelines, which collectively define an XML format, are the defining output of the community of practice. The format differs from other well-known open formats for text (such as HTML and OpenDocument) in that it’s main mission is for encoding “extant” texts such that they are amenable to scholarly processing. After a brief introduction to the TEI, we will discuss the mechanisms built in to the TEI for customization.

Customizing JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite)

Document Type: The core JATS Document Type is a journal article and the ANSI/NISO JATS Tag Sets are journal article tag sets, which define XML elements and attributes to describe the content and/or the metadata of journal articles. Such articles may include: research articles; subject review articles; non-research articles; editorials; letters; product, software, and book reviews; obituaries, and the peer reviews or author responses included with an article. Although originally just for journal articles, JATS-based tag sets have been built for: books (BITS: Book Interchange Tag Suite), standards (NISO STS, ISO STS), technical reports, conference proceedings, magazines and newsletters, and even posters. Purpose: Provides common XML format to preserve the intellectual content of journal articles (independent of format of initial publication) Expected Uses: Conversion target, archival storage, and interchange Expected Users: Publishers, aggregators, vendors, web-hosts, libraries, and archives who produce, interchange, and store journal article content When: ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019 JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite (current) Customization Mechanism: The JATS Journal Article Tag Sets are distributed in DTD form, XSD form, and RELAX NG form, but they are maintained as DTDs. The customization mechanism for DTDs is modularization and Parameter Entities, with customization-specific information overriding JATS-default information. This paper will describe, explain, and illustrate this mechanism. Specific customization samples are provided in the Appendix Sample JATS Customizations URL: https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/

DITA Grammar Customization

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard defines a layered extension mechanism, "specialization", for defining grammars such that the element types and attributes in any conforming DITA grammar are explicitly mapped back to one or more "base" types, with the lowest base type being the type defined in the core DITA grammar. This means that any conforming DITA document can be processed in terms of the base types of the document's elements and attributes, irrespective of how specialized the elements and attributes themselves are. The architecture itself depends only on the use of a DITA-defined attribute (@class), where the value is normally set as a default in the grammar. The DITA standard defines conventions for DTD and RELAX NG grammar modules that enable re-use of the declarations for base types when defining new types or constraining existing types and makes customizing content models about as easy as it can be. The DITA standard defines three types of customization: "configuration", "constraint", and "specialization". Configuration combines existing grammar modules in the context of a top-level "shell" grammar to define a unique DITA document type without directly defining or modifying any element type or attribute declarations. Constraints modify existing element type or attribute declarations to make them more constrained (such as disallowing specific elements) but does not add new element types or attributes. Specialization defines new element types or attributes. For DITA DTDs, customization is done through parameter entities and references to individual grammar modules. For DITA RNGs, customization is done through declaration or overriding of patterns. The DITA Technical Committee maintains tooling for generating conforming DITA DTDs from conforming DITA RNGs.

Akoma Ntoso

We present different techniques to manage customization of Akoma Ntoso XSD, an OASIS XML vocabulary for legal documents, using native elements, like <foreign> or <proprietary>, general elements, modules or tools.

Markup Vocabulary Customization

Introductory paragraph for the 2019 Balisage Symposium Proceedings

Customizing DocBook

DocBook is a general purpose XML vocabulary particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications). DocBook has been under active maintenance for more than 20 years; it began life as an SGML document type definition. Because it is a large and robust schema, and because its main structures correspond to the general notion of what constitutes a “book,” DocBook has been adopted by a large and growing community of authors writing books of all kinds. After a brief introduction to DocBook, we will discuss the mechanisms built in to DocBook for customization.