About his famous painting, “La trahison des images“, René Magritte said:

‘The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!’

Other interpretations notwithstanding, both painting and quote show the importance to make a clear distinction between a representation and an actual thing; or a “signifié” and “signifiant“, to use Saussure’s terms.

Regarding the TEI and a possible P6, this to my mind means that we need a clearer distinction between “the three TEIs”. We have a set of elements and attributes for schema description/definition, for text description, and for meta data (in the broadest sense).

The problem is that these three sets that have very distinct uses share a lot of elements and attributes. We have cases that state what an element or attribute is about when annotating a text, just to add that it has a completely different meaning when used in a schema defintion.

This makes reusing the data much more complicated as one cannot be certain that, e.g., a word contained in a tei:p is actually part of a text.

My poster will present this, admittedly radical, approach how to fully separate the three areas, thus reducing ambiguity, improving interoperability, and making information retrieval easier. It is, however, aimed at retaining as much compatibility with P5 as possible by trying to reuse existing definitions wherever that is possible.

I hope to spark a discussion about whether this is a good approach and how a new P6 would be drawn up.