RDF and Topic Maps may appear to address this problem (they are after all specifications for expressing “semantic relations,” and they both have XML transfer syntaxes), but in reality their focus is on generic semantics — propositions about the real world — and not the semantics of markup languages.
Recent proposals for creating digital scholarly editions (DSEs) through the crowdsourcing of transcriptions and collaborative scholarship, for the establishment of national repositories of digital humanities data, and for the referencing, sharing, and storage of DSEs, have underlined the need for greater data interoperability. The TEI Guidelines have tried to establish standards for encoding transcriptions since 1988. However, because the choice of tags is guided by human interpretation, TEI-XML encoded files are in general not interoperable. One way to fix this problem may be to break down the current all-in-one approach to encoding so that DSEs can be specified instead by a bundle of separate resources that together offer greater interoperability: plain text versions, markup, annotations, and metadata. This would facilitate not only the development of more general software for handling DSEs, but also enable existing programs that already handle these kinds of data to function more efficiently.
As I see it, TEI is for describing the elements of a document; transforming to HTML with RDFa can add a meaningful interpretative layer, stating what the document is saying about the external world.
TEI is XML based, and thus it suffers heavy limitations, such as overlapping annotations. RDF is able to overcome this, using ontology vocabularies and allowing powerful queries.
En RDF, la logique structurelle est toujours la même, puisqu'elle est intrinsèque au modèle : <Sujet> <Prédicat> <Objet>. La validation « structurelle » de RDF se situe donc au niveau de l'assertion ou de la donnée à la différence de XML dont la validation est documentaire. En réalité, RDF ne s'intéresse pas à l'encodage d'une structure, mais plutôt à celui de la logique des données. C'est là que rentrent en jeu les ontologies.
Le Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, initialement publié par Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange (1610-1688), est un glossaire du latin médiéval, en latin moderne.
Currently, the SIG is working on a document called Guidelines for the creation of TEI documents that will map well to ontologies such as the CIDOC-CRM.