ODD (Text Encoding Initiative)

ODD stands for "One Document Does it all". Part of the Text Encoding Initiative, it is an XML-based format for writing human-readable descriptions of XML files.^[1][2] ODD allows its users to customize the P5 version of the TEI XML formats by writing XML schemas in a literate programming fashion.^[3]

ODD documents are themselves valid Text Encoding Initiative XML files. They use the 'tagdocs' or Documentation Elements module, which is a specification meta-schema format for documenting the relations and constraints between the modules, classes, elements, attributes, and content models which make up a particular TEI customization. In this way, ODD is a meta-schema language which allows a single source file to be translated into multiple formats of schema files: DTDs, W3C XML Schema, Relax NG Compact Syntax, and Relax NG XML Syntax schemas. As well as being used to generate schemas in this way, ODD files are self-documenting: they can contain descriptive prose which acts as project-specific documentation for that TEI customisation. From a single ODD file one can generate localised and internationalised documentation which describes the schema in human-readable text and which incorporates the various customizations to the base TEI standard that the ODD file encodes.

The Roma web application^[4] can understand the ODD format and use it to automatically generate validators for a given schema.

Although ODD files generally describe the difference between a customized XML format and the full TEI model, ODD also can be used to describe XML formats that are entirely separate from the TEI. One example of this is the W3C's Internationalization Tag Set which uses the ODD format to generate schemas and document its vocabulary.^[5][6] The TEI P5 Guidelines themselves are also written using ODD.^[7]

References

1. ^ Bauman, Syd; Flanders, Julia (2004), "ODD customizations", Extreme Markup Languages 2004, http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2004/Bauman01/EML2004Bauman01.html .
2. ^ Burnard, Lou; Rahtz, Sebastian (2004), "RelaxNG with Son of ODD", Extreme Markup Languages 2004, http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2004/Burnard01/EML2004Burnard01.html .
3. ^ Reiss, Kevin M. (2007), Literate Documentation for XML, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: Digital Humanities 2007, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/abstracts/xhtml.xq?id=208 .(link dead 1 April 2010)
4. ^ Roma web application.
5. ^ W3C ITS and TEI ODD file.
6. ^ Savourel, Yves; Kosek, Jirka; Ishida, Richard, eds. (2008), "5.2 ITS and TEI", Best Practices for XML Internationalization, W3C Working Group, http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/ .
7. ^ Burnard, Lou; Bauman, Syd, eds. (2007), TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA: TEI Consortium, http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/ .

External links

• ODD Article on the TEI wiki