Conceptual Levels of SGML Tags: A Proposed Taxonomy based on the Tagging in the Orlando Project

Several projects in various disciplines are now using Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) tags at an interpretive level. That is, these projects contain tags which have the potential to provide the reader with additional information that is not already explicit in the text itself. One such interpretive project is the Orlando Project, which is an integrated history of women’s writing in the British Isles, currently under development in Canada. Orlando is unlike other projects in that the content is being written and tagged simultaneously. It also contains a wide and rich variety of both descriptive and interpretive tags, which provide the user with a wealth of information on women’s writing in the British Isles. But the project does not currently provide an explicit indication of the level of description or interpretation to be expected in any given tag. Without such a taxonomy, projects like Orlando risk introducing potential ambiguities for the scholarly user. This paper therefore proposes a potential conceptual tag taxonomy for literary interpretive SGML projects such as Orlando. 1 Other approaches to this problem include eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which can be considered as a subset of the grammar of SGML, and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which is (at least in its earlier basic forms) a DTD. Because of the similarity between XML and SGML, further references in this paper to SGML can be understood as referring to both grammars.