The TEI has achieved a major milestone in establishing an intellectual foundation for text encoding and a set of encoding conventions substantial enough to serve the fundamental needs of most encoding projects, both large and small. However, much of this development has necessarily taken place in advance of experience. It is essential to continue the work if the TEI by extending the Guidelines more broadly and providing materials and facilities for user support. In addition, now that the core of a coherent set of encoding practices has been established, it is critical to provide for extensive evaluation and testing in large-scale use, and to implement mechanisms for continued extension and modification of the Guidelines in response.

The best way to promote a standard is to develop resources and software that embody it. Therefore, the primary focus of the TEI must shift to the wide-spread and large-scale implementation of the Guidelines. Actual use of the Guidelines will become the major force driving the development of extensions and modifications to it. Activity within the TEI will focus on user support, instruction, consulting, etc. One of the primary roles of the TEI will be to form a liaison with and provide consultancy for users, as appropriate, to ensure compatibility with the Guidelines as they currently exist, and to incorporate the results eventually into future versions. Another central concern of this phase will besystematic evaluation and review, again accomplished on the basis of actual experience using the Guidelines, the results of which will also guide the further development of the Guidelines.

Extension of the Guidelines will continue, to incorporate modifications, revisions, and extensions suggested or required on the basis of user responses; provide refinements and further developments of chapters in the current version; and form or encourage work groups for areas that have only been outlined, for example, physical description (manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions, etc.), literary analysis and interpretation, alignment mechanisms for multilingual corpora and for coordinating speech with speech transcriptions, multimedia processing, etc.

Sources:

* Nancy M. Ide and C.M. Sperberg-McQueen. (1995). “The Text Encoding Initiative: Its History, Goals and Future Development”. Retrieved: 06 February 2008.http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/papers/teiHistory.pdf