CMIF – Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format

by TEI Correspondence SIG 2015-2025 (see license and see citation)

Current Version: 1.1.0 (26 February 2025)

About

The CMIF has been developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG, and makes a standardized comparison of letter metadata possible. It does this by reducing the index to only the most essential elements—the sender, addressee, date, and location of a letter—as well as by regulating the inputted data. In addition to the benefits of TEI-XML encoding, this is greatly aided through authority files. Sender, addressee, and locations are identifiable independently of the specific project (for example through the GND number from the German National Library) and thus can be linked together. Finally, in CMI the individual letter is referenced for print editions by the letter identification number or bibliographical information and for digital editions by the URL.

The CMIF is based essentially on the TEI extension ‘correspDesc’ (Correspondence Description), a part of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. The element correspDesc was developed by the TEI Correspondence Special Interest Group in order to record correspondence-specific metadata from letters, postcards, etc., in TEI-based editions. In April 2015 ‘correspDesc’ was officially added to the version 2.8 of TEI P5.

The CMIF is the underlying data format for the web service ‘correspSearch’ (funded by the German Research Foundation) which enables scholars to search across diverse distributed scholarly editions of correspondence (both printed and digital).

How-to

• Documentation of the CMIF
• Template files
• Example files

The research project "correspSearch" provides a tutorial and an online tool, the CMIF Creator, which allows scholars to create and edit CMIF files without any knowledge of TEI-XML.

There are various ways of extracting CMIF from existing TEI collections via XSL-T or XQuery. Reusable examples include:

• https://github.com/QHOD/qhodCMIFxquery a basic XQuery for the QhoD project
• cmif.xql: an XQuery script used within the WeGA-WebApp for creating its CMIF file.
• CMIFerator, an app for eXistdb based digital editions
• CSV2CMI, for transforming CSV tables of letters to CMIF

Discussion & further development

• Proposal of CMIF v2 in this repository.
• See also "Dumont et al. 2019" for the further development of the CMIF. Discuss there via Hypothes.is, in the section "Issues" in this repository or on the Mailinglist of the TEI Correspondence SIG.

Changelog

Version 1.1 (2025-02-26)

• bibl/@xml:id is now mandatory
• Restrict: persName & Co, correspAction/@type and content of correspAction
  
• Allow @cert and @evidence for persName & Co
• Allow text in correspAction/date
• Introduce additional Schematron file for CMIF
• Proposals for CMIF v1.1 and CMIF v2
• Updated documentation
• Minor Bugfixes & adjustments to current TEI Guidelines

Literature

• Peter Stadler, Marcel Illetschko, and Sabine Seifert, « Towards a Model for Encoding Correspondence in the TEI: Developing and Implementing », Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 9 (2016-2017) URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1433; DOI: 10.4000/jtei.1433
• Stefan Dumont, « Perspectives of the further development of the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF) — digiversity », 10.2015, URL: https://digiversity.net/2015/perspectives-of-the-further-development-of-the-correspondence-metadata-interchange-format-cmif/.
• Stefan Dumont, « correspSearch – Connecting Scholarly Editions of Letters », Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 10 (2016). URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1742; DOI: 10.4000/jtei.1742
• Stefan Dumont, Ingo Börner, Dominik Leipold, Jonas Müller-Laackman, Gerlinde Schneider: Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format, in: Encoding Correspondence. A Manual for Encoding Letters and Postcards in TEI-XML and DTABf, edited by Stefan Dumont, Susanne Haaf and Sabine Seifert. Berlin 2019. https://encoding-correspondence.bbaw.de/v1/CMIF.html
  
• Stephan Kurz, « Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF) », KONDE Weißbuch. Hrsg. v. Helmut W. Klug unter Mitarbeit von Selina Galka und Elisabeth Steiner im HRSM-Projekt Kompetenznetzwerk Digitale Edition. Graz 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/11471/562.50.42.

Citation

TEI Correspondence SIG. 2025. Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF). v1.1.0. https://github.com/TEI-Correspondence-SIG/CMIF

License

© TEI Correspondence SIG 2015-2025

This work is available under dual license: BSD 2-Clause and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0)