Digital Roadmap and TILE

One central task for the upcoming years will be the migration of the database underlying the Dictionary, Bibliography and Catalog from its current custom PostgreSQL schema to a more standardized and maintainable infrastructure. In the roadmap that I developed for the Bavarian Academy’s Gandhāra project, much of the initial technical work concerns the conversion of the database’s content to an XML schema following the Text Encoding Initiative’s guidelines and compatible with the EpiDoc TEI application. We are planning to use the eXist XML database server to host our data, and will carry out customizations and extensions as needed. The presentation of our source data will also make extensive use of links between transliterated text and manuscript or inscription images. I anticipated that we would have to develop much of the code for this ourselves, but in the meantime, the TILE project (based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Indiana University) has implemented a solid foundation for what we need, and we will be able to contribute to their existing codebase and customize it rather than having to develop a TEI‐based text‐image linking mechanism from scratch. This will free up resources for the last major component of our digital roadmap: the development of an infrastructure for preparing as much as possible of our publications (text editions and reference works) within the database system, with largely automated production of online and print versions as individual publications reach completion.