Markup Overlap: A Review and a Horse

"Overlap" is the common term for cases where some markup structures do not nest neatly into others, such as when a quotation starts in the middle of one paragraph and ends in the middle of the next. OSIS [Duru03], a standard XML schema for Biblical and related materials, has to deal with extreme amounts of overlap. The simplest case involves book/chapter/verse and book/story/ paragraph hierarchies that pervasively diverge; but many types of overlap are more complicated than this. The basic options for dealing with overlap in the context of SGML [ISO 8879] or XML [Bray98] are described in the TEI Guidelines [TEI]. I summarize these with their strengths and weaknesses. Previous proposals for expressing overlap, or at least kinds of overlap, don’t work well enough for the severe and frequent cases found in OSIS. Thus, I present a variation on TEI milestone markup that has several advantages. This is now the normative way of encoding non-hierarchical structures in OSIS documen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: EXTREME
• Authors: Steven J. DeRose
• Keywords: Book/story/ Paragraph Hierarchies, EXTREME 2004, Natural Language Processing, Standard Xml Schema, TEI Milestone Markup