semantic annotation of Drama Texts?

[galleron]

Dear Raffaele Viglianti,
I am currently looking at solutions allowing me to practice different semantic annotations on theatrical texts from the French 17th and 18th centuries, and I was wondering to what extent I could use coreBuilder for this.

To explain my needs, I'll start with a span of text, as it is actually encoded in XML/TEI:

ADMETEET ALCESTE,TRAGÉDIE.ACTE PREMIER.

Scene premiere. POLIDECTE, ADRASTE. POLIDECTE. Mon frere va périr. Voici le jour terrible Qu'il doit être frapé d'une main invisible. On the one hand, I would like to be able to markup the various internal stage directions that appear in the text; on the other hand, I'd like to mark-up the various references to the characters, and to their characteristics. In the above quoted text, I would have: Mon frere - this string of characters refers to a certain Admete, who is further characterised as being the brother of the person speaking (#FPB = "family position brother"; this traces back to a feature structure I've defined for encoding various aspects of a character - age, fmaily position, occupation, and so on. Values of ana can concatenate for marking-up strings carrying more than one kind of information, as it often happen) le jour terrible - this string refers to the moment when the action takes place, and is the internal stage direction equivalent of In this specific case, the two strings do not overlap, but this is not always the case, hence the need for stand-off annotation - not to mention the desire to maintain a certain readability of the text.

Having read your paper in JTEI about coreBuilder, I had a go to it with my text. From the various presets of stand-off elements, I've used "apparatus entry" and came up with something like this:

Now, if I understand correctly your wiki, it would be possible to customise the preset stand-off elements, and to have a set with and (instead of and ), and another set with and , the first for encoding characters, the second for encoding internal stage directions. But my problem is that I am quite limited in the values of attributes I can give to @ana, respectively @type - as I pointed to before, I have developed quite an elaborate set of values based on feature structure. Is the a way of going around this? More generally, does it make sense to use coreBuilder for my purposes?

Sorry for this long email/ issue, hope it may be of interest to you.

best regards,
Ioana Galleron