Transforming machine readable sources

Abstract

The advent of the big statistical packages has in recent years lead to a de-facto standardization of numerical data: as all the large-scale statistical systems accept roughly the same input conventions, the exchange of date between them has become increasingly easy. Text based, data base related or image oriented projects in history do not, so far, share that benefit: her the exchange of data between individual projects and the utilisation of data prepared by other projects is still a major problem. This paper considers a system for easy transformations of formats between various software environments. While the following considerations are independent of the currently much discussed Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) the might be seen as the implementation of a tool, which could handle the standards which are proposed there, eases, however, also the transformation between text base and data environments.