Topic Maps and TEI - Using Topic Maps as a Tool for Presenting TEI Documents

Abstract

This paper describes a method used by the website of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC), in which Topic Maps are used as a tool for presenting TEI-encoded texts in HTML form. Many electronic text archives transform their TEI texts into HTML for publishing their texts on the World Wide Web. Typically each chapter or page is transformed from TEI into a separate web page. Such a method produces websites that have the same structure as a physical book.

However, TEI is more expressive than HTML and can encode many other features of interest than just chapters, pages, and paragraphs. For example, TEI is also used to encode information about people and places and events, as well as literary criticism, and linguistic analysis. Indeed, TEI is designed to be extended to suit all kinds of scholarly needs.

These more complex aspects of text encoding are more difficult to transform into HTML. Because TEI is designed to be convenient for scholars to encode complex information, rather than for readers to understand it, it is necessary to transform the TEI into another form suitable for display. For instance, where a TEI corpus includes references to people, these references might be collated together to produce an index. For practical purposes, it is often necessary to extract information from TEI into a database, so that it can be queried conveniently and transformed into a web site.

The new "Topic Map" standard of the International Standards Organisation is identified as a suitable technology for solving this problem. A topic map is a kind of Web database with an extremely flexible structure. This paper describes a framework for using TEI in conjunction with Topic Maps to produce a large website which can be navigated easily in many directions.