Trials of the Late Roman Republic
C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen · Balisage series on markup technologies · 2016
The Trials of the Late Roman Republic (TLRR) project is building an XML database with information about criminal and civil legal proceedings in the period 149 to 50 BC; it is a revision of a work first published in book form in 1991. TLRR is a SAND: a small, arcane, non-trivial dataset. It exhibits in acute form problems also seen in other XML projects and offers a convenient medium for experimenting with solutions to those problems, including partial and uncertain data, relatively heavy annotation of data by means of notes, potential links to other resources with information about people and other entities appearing in TLRR, a distributed project team, and sparse resources. The paper describes the initial translation of the data into XML form and the stepwise refinement of the markup, the creation of Web-based XML editing interfaces for the data, and the treatment of uncertain data in query interfaces.