Märgendusstruktuure

Märgendusstruktuure is a term used in Estonian-language discourse to denote the systematic organization of markers or annotations within a data artifact. It covers how annotations are defined, stored, and related to the content they describe. The concept is relevant across linguistics, digital humanities, and information science, where consistent annotation structures support analysis, retrieval, and interoperability.

Etymology and scope: Derived from märgendus (annotation, marking) and struktuure (structures), the term emphasizes both the content of annotations (what is marked) and the architecture that holds those marks (how it is organized). It encompasses schema design, tagging conventions, and the infrastructure for encoding annotations alongside primary data.

Components: A märgendusstruktuure typically includes a tag schema (a controlled vocabulary of marks), a tagging guideline, a data model describing how markers relate to data elements, metadata describing provenance and versioning, and encoding formats such as TEI, XML, JSON-LD, or RDF. It may distinguish hierarchical versus flat structures, and separate core data from annotations.

Applications: Used in corpus linguistics for part-of-speech and morphological tagging, in digital editions for annotations and commentary, and in metadata modeling for archives and libraries. Examples include token-level annotations, named-entity tagging, dependency relations, and cross-referencing relations between documents and entities.

Benefits and challenges: Märgendusstruktuure promote consistency, reuse, and machine readability, enabling efficient search and integration. Challenges include maintaining interoperability across projects, adapting to evolving schemas, and ensuring multilingual and cross-domain compatibility.

See also: annotation, metadata, schema, ontology, TEI, RDF, XML, JSON-LD.