A data model supporting conflict resolving in cooperative text editions — HypereiDoc

HypereiDoc is an XML based framework that has been designed to support multi-layered processing of epigraphical, papyrological or similar texts in a cooperative, and distributed manner for modern critical editions. Creating an edition, philologists may however face the problem that a prepared edition is semantically unjust. The reason behind semantically damaged editions is merging virtual text-documents that annotate the same piece of text differently, and occasionally made by different scholar teams independently of each other. Current initiatives like TEI and Epidoc have definitive limitations both in expressional power and the way how individual results can form a cooperative product. The HypereiDoc framework provides XML schema definition for a set of annotation-based layers connected by an extensive reference system, validating and building tools, and an editor that makes on-line visualization of the base text and the annotations. The framework that makes scholars able to work on the same text in a cooperative and distributed way has been successfully tested by philologists working on the Hypereides palimpsest.