EuRED : XML-TEI in database structure
Résumé
The EuRED project (http://eured.univ-lemans.fr) consists on a RDBMS gathering reading
experiences made by Europeans from the 15th century until today. It is part of a larger research
program (P-RECIHC, http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/?Project=ANR-14-CE31-0018)
funded by the ANR (French national research agency). The database has been inspired by the purely
British UK-RED database (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK) which was launched in 2006
and contains approximately 40 000 records. Our goal, by achieving a proof of concept, is to give UK-
RED a chronological and geographical extension, to take care both of new sources (CMCs ...) and
new needs expressed by researchers. This is why new fields necessary to describe reading
experiences have been added to UK-RED's data model.
It was very quickly decided to convert the existing data in TEI P5 and, therefore, to build a new data
model. The choice of TEI P5 is relevant for two main reasons : first, around 90 % of the UK-RED
fields can easily be replaced by existing TEI P5 elements ; second, TEI P5 is customisable. Thus a
new class (model.experienceDescPart) containing 23 new elements mostly linked with thesaurii has
been designed to help describing reading experiences. In EuRED's data model, these new elements
are placed in the and not in the
. Besides the challenge of the conversion of
UK-RED's data (now under process), this decision was made because EuRED is not a database
gathering textual sources containing transcriptions of reading experiences, but, on the contrary, a
database gathering transcriptions of reading experiences located in textual sources.
This conceptual and technical choice should be discussed because it poses the very important
question of the possibility to use TEI P5 not only for encoding textual sources but also specifically
for database management purposes, this way opening new directions.