It has been 11 years[1] since the TEI Processing Model was first presented at the TEI Conference in Lyon and shortly after became part of the TEI Guidelines. It's not easy to say how many digital editions and other scholarly publications are using it, but certainly enough to draw some conclusions,[2] relevant to shaping the TEI's future.

In a decade of writing ODDs with TEI Processing Models for a great variety of projects, it seems the main challenges of using TEI for publishing and interoperability do not lie where they are commonly perceived: definitely not in the large number of available elements nor the complexity of the TEI schema. The recently released teipublisher.odd,[3] a successor of the teiSimplePrint.odd originally released by TEI-C, serves as a base for Processing Model customizations for all TEI Publisher editions, which is to say it tries to cover the sensible default handling for a large body of possible TEI documents —an aim comparable with the familiar TEI Stylesheets.

This comprehensive TEI ODD contains around 250 model specifications for just over a 100 TEI elements. Numbers average to around 2.5 models per element but such a picture is misleading: over 60% of elements needs just one model, and only 15 elements require 4 or more models. Closer examination of model and behaviour distributions across the TEI elements, in conjunction with analysis of customization needs for editions identifies clear directions for the TEI as a standard to provide its community a strong, interoperable basic framework, without compromising on its winning formula for flexibility and extendability.

This paper is going to discuss in detail where exactly the sensitive areas lie (e.g. formalization of generalization, specialization and meronymic relations), in the hope that future TEI development will address these as a priority for the benefit of the larger community.

[1] Eleven years “[...] what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt” (M. Travis, Sixteen tons); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons.

[2] Largest registry of editions using the TEI Processing Model is the Project Registry maintained by e-editiones: https://www.e-editiones.org/map/

[3] https://github.com/eeditiones/jinks/blob/main/profiles/base10/resources/odd/teipublisher.odd