textssecara

Textssecara is a proposed open standard and software toolkit designed to support the encoding, annotation, and analysis of large textual corpora. The name blends English "texts" with a Malay/Indonesian word secara meaning "systematically" or "by means of," reflecting the aim of systematic textual work.

Overview and purpose: The project seeks interoperability between existing standards such as TEI, Dublin Core, and RDF, enabling consistent representation of texts, annotations, provenance, and licensing. It emphasizes reproducibility by embedding versioning and process metadata.

Architecture and components: The specification defines a core data model that captures texts, segments, and annotations, together with a metadata schema for authorship, edition history, and licensing. Tooling includes validators, transformers, and parsers to convert between Textssecara and other formats, and a modular runtime for analysis tasks.

Annotations and data model: Annotations can be layered (linguistic, scholarly, editorial) with provenance data. Projections for indexing and search are supported via pluggable backends, enabling flexible querying and analysis workflows.

Implementation status and adoption: As of now, Textssecara exists as a community-driven concept with reference specifications and example implementations in several languages. Adoption is ongoing in some digital humanities projects and teaching labs; mainstream use remains limited but growing.

Reception and governance: Scholars note its potential to reduce fragmentation but caution about ensuring adequate documentation and governance to maintain interoperability and long-term sustainability.

See also: TEI, RDF, JSON-LD, Dublin Core.