Tuluallikateks

Tuluallikateks is a proposed open standard in digital humanities for encoding textual works and their metadata. It provides a modular data model designed to represent texts, their editions, sources, and annotations in a way that supports provenance, licensing, and cross-repository interoperability. The aim is to facilitate consistent representation of a text’s life cycle—from its source material and editions to its scholarly annotations—across libraries, museums, and publishers.

The name combines elements intended to evoke origin or source with a root that signals text, reflecting its focus on linking textual content to its lineage and context. Development of the concept emerged in scholarly discussions during the mid-2010s, with input from libraries, universities, and digitization projects. It is intended to complement established standards such as TEI, Dublin Core, and RDF rather than replace them.

Structure and core components: Tuluallikateks defines core entities including TextContent, Edition, Source, Provenance, Annotations, Rights, and Relationships. Each entity carries fields such as title, author, language, date, edition identifier, and license, along with links to digitized files, manuscripts, or authority records. The model emphasizes edition history, lineage of the text, and the ability to capture both primary and ancillary metadata.

Serialization and interoperability: Data under this framework can be serialized in JSON-LD or RDF, enabling persistent identifiers and connections between digital objects across repositories. It supports version control for editions and layered annotations, promoting reproducibility in scholarly work.

Applications and status: In practice, Tuluallikateks is used in pilot digitization projects and institutional repositories to improve search, rights management, and scholarly collaboration. Adoption has been gradual, and the standard remains the subject of discussion in professional forums.

See also: TEI, Dublin Core, RDF. References: Tuluallikateks specification (draft) and related digital humanities literature.