[Corpora-List] Is the TEI a waste of time? / Lack of TEI software tools

[Oliver Mason]

I would guess that most software uses internal, non-XML formats, as they
are generally easier to process from a programmer's point of view and
more efficient computationally; and if you've got large corpora time and
space efficiency are quite important.  My own approach has always been
that TEI-style markup is fine for exchanging data, but when it is being
indexed and prepared for processing it'll be converted into some
tool-specific form.

So, yes, the TEI is important, as it means that there is a standard for
the data that's coming in, even though corpus processing software will
typically not operate directly on that.  Corpus tools should accept TEI
marked-up data, but might convert it into their own format.

Oliver

PS Of course I'm not denying that it is possible to write concordancing
   software that works with XML data.