As a model dedicated to text, TEI does not yet offer structures for describing works of art. However, it may be necessary to describe heritage objects and their material aspects such as manuscripts or illuminations. Thus, the TEI Consortium recently introduced a new element whose content model is inspired by . Strongly focused on the materiality of writings, this model however lacks genericity to cover all the needs of art historians. Indeed, it may be necessary in digital publishing projects to have to document works in the same way that we treat people, organizations and places with the namesdates module.
Of course, art historians can use other XML models to describe heritage objects, such as LIDO, a format compatible with CIDOC-CRM. But this exchange format is very inconvenient for editing. Moreover, the disadvantage of using another documentary model is that the description is taken out of the TEI edition. In the context of an art history project on the edition of Ledoux's Book and prints, we had to document complex editorial phenomena and architectural works. We sought to develop and extend the content model of the element in the most generic way possible to describe artworks, based on the CIDOC-CRM conceptual model.
This proposal respects the abstract model of TEI in features, states and events which we found very compatible with CIDOC-CRM. As much as possible, structures already adopted for the , or content models have been preferred, limiting the introduction of new elements and their modification. The documentation of works that do not necessarily have a name, often relies on a typological description, to this end we have in particular introduced a description structure that can also benefit existing content models. An ODD specification has been produced as well as a conversion to RDF.