Towards a TEI compliant interchange format for Ancient Egyptian-Coptic textual resources

Sharing digital textual resources is an actual challenge for scholars working on Ancient Egyptian-Coptic (3000 BC-1350 AD). There are two types of reasons for this: first, the different writing systems that have been used throughout the history of this language (hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts, demotic, Coptic) led to various solutions as regards the encoding of texts; second, the diverging aims and scopes of the projects involved in creating annotated corpora of Ancient Egyptian-Coptic generated representation formats with few characteristics in common. As a result, the resources themselves cannot be shared, and no standard tool can be used for encoding, annotating, querying or analyzing these resources.
In order to overcome these issues, several leading projects in the field join forces and introduce a TEI compliant interchange data model that has the following characteristics:
1) The ancient Egyptian-Coptic TEI interchange data model represents an agreement on a subset of the EpiDoc schema towards which the textual data of each project can be converted. Project specific annotations are dealt with either using stand-off markup that refers to tokens of transliterated texts (Bański 2010; Pose et al. 2014), or on the basis of data models that are true expansions of the kernel interchange data model.
2) The specialized metadata elements and attributes referring to Egyptological concepts are based on controlled vocabularies that are shared and enriched collaboratively by the projects.
3) These metadata apply either to physical text-bearing objects, inscribed physical features, witnesses (on documents) or texts (Morlock & Santin 2014). As the conceptualization of the relationship between these entities is shared between projects, coherence and precision when describing both the material, philological and linguistic dimensions of textual resources can be obtained.