Desmond Schmidt has published "Towards an Interoperable Digital Scholarly Edition" in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative.
Here's an excerpt:
The change in context between the pre-Web world of 1988, its isolated microcomputers and CD-ROMs, and the modern connected, mobile world of Web 2.0 is stark. Texts now have a different purpose: they need to be much more than simply exchangeable via disk or email, they need to instantly respond to heterogenous needs. Inevitably, this has resulted in a growing discontent with traditional approaches to encoding one-off literary and historical documentary texts (Mueller 2013; Robinson 2010). This discontent has focused on the size of the TEI Guidelines (currently 553 tags), the consequent difficulty of comprehending it enough to use it (Usdin 2009), and its inability to elegantly represent overlapping structures that are common in born-material texts (Renear, Mylonas, and Durand 1993). But arguably the most serious problem, now generally recognized (Unsworth 2011; Bauman 2011), is that TEI-encoded texts are not interoperable: that is, they cannot be fully used in various applications without preliminary, and often substantial, conversion.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
