# Text Encoding Initiative

Date: 2020-04-12 13:07:20 +08:00Date modified: 2021-06-19 14:45:10 +08:00

Having your research stored as text files written in a lightweight markup language is great. However, certain information can still get lost in the way. For example, certain words like "London" can either mean the famous capital of England, a city in France, or certain people with the name. You can find similar situations with Wikipedia disambiguation pages (like the previous example).

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) attempts to solve exactly that. It's a standard that focuses on the semantic meaning of the words. Being a standard, it also frees the writers from software dependency and developers have to follow it instead.

The specification uses XML for markup and there are various tools for creating TEI-specific contents aside from the already existing ecosystem of XML-related tools. It can also export into various formats through XSLT 2.0 stylesheets including HTML, LaTeX, and JSON files.