Our Work

The Réseau-Observatoire maintains a selected body of information on standards, nomenclatures, and editorial practices applicable to textual resources. Each record connects a document with its issuing organization, revision, domain, persistent address, and precise place of application.

On that basis, the Network prepares profiles for its own and associated projects, maintains several local specifications, and keeps a registry of published implementations. The work is organized so that subject expertise, language editing, and technical preservation remain distinct.

Catalogue of References and Nomenclatures

Many fields already have stable systems for naming, classification, and data representation. ISO 704 sets out the general principles of terminology work: the relationship between object, concept, definition, and designation; the formation of terms and proper names; and the preparation of specialized vocabularies.¹ The French Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language publishes terms and definitions each year in the Journal officiel; in 2024 it published 228 entries prepared by a network of nearly 400 experts, while FranceTerme contained more than 9,500 terms.²

In digital philology, other references serve that role. TEI describes the structure of electronic text, metadata, dictionary entries, names, places, and editorial history; EpiDoc narrows and specifies TEI for the edition of ancient documents.³ IIIF connects images, page sequences, annotations, transcriptions, and translations within a single digital object.⁴

The Réseau-Observatoire catalogue brings such sources together by function. It shows where a ready-made solution exists, what questions it leaves to the project, and which revision was applied.

The “Reference Systems and Nomenclatures” section contains the active selection. The wider program covers terminology, cataloguing, biological and chemical names, transliteration, manuscript description, medical and financial concept systems, and other subject areas.

Application Profiles

A general standard usually offers more possibilities than a single collection requires. An application profile records the local choice: mandatory metadata, identifier structure, bibliographic reference form, segmentation levels, alignment rules, permitted element set, or method for transmitting variants.

The profile is published as a separate document with a revision number. This allows two resources to cite the same reference while showing where their practices diverge. For TEI, this approach is part of the normal architecture: project constraints can be expressed in a formal customization and used both for documentation and for data validation.⁵

The working series currently provides for the following areas:

Working codes become permanent after the series nomenclature is approved and the first revision of the document is published.

Maintained Specifications

The Réseau-Observatoire publishes local specifications for issues not covered by an external reference or requiring a common practice across several projects. Each record identifies the maintainer, revision, date, changes, replaced documents, and published implementations.

The MN-LS profile concerns a normalized lexico-syntactic representation. It defines permitted classes of lexical bases, use of productive forms, regular derivation, unmarked component order, and explicit expression of selected grammatical relations. Conformity is assessed through the properties of the finished text; within the permitted space, the editor preserves stylistic and lexical choice.

The complete textual implementation of the active revision is used in reference and publishing resources under the name romanova. The specification, language documentation, and texts are published in separate environments:

1. active specification and revision history — in the Réseau-Observatoire catalogue;
2. texts, dictionary, and reading materials — on romanova.language.re;
3. early revisions of the general grammar — in the AlterVista historical archive.

Corpus of Applications

The registry of applications creates a verifiable link between a profile and a concrete object. Each record contains the source material, its subject owner, the editor of the normalized version, the applied specification, the licence, the date, and the canonical place of publication.

This model allows one profile to be applied in several disciplines. A patristic resource is responsible for attribution and source text; a linguistic project for morphological analysis; a financial portal for subject definitions. The Réseau-Observatoire may prepare a normalized version, harmonize terminology, establish alignment, or register an implementation.

thematic project
        ↓
scientific and editorial content
        ↓
normalized layer
        ↓
publication · parallel corpus · terminology database
        ↓
central implementation record

Current Fields

Ancient and early Christian texts. Paracalypsis serves as a publication environment for ancient, patristic, and Judeo-Christian materials. For such objects, the Network develops a common description of source, segmentation, parallel versions, and editorial history.

Biblical and linguistic resources. Institute for Biblical Content brings together thematic projects, while Biblical Hebrew for Linguists publishes the Westminster Leningrad Codex with glosses, syntactic representation, and analytical lexicon.⁶ Within this field, work is underway on normalized definitions, links between lemmas and fragments, and parallel representations of selected materials. The Westminster text has its own electronic history and must not be described as identical to the printed Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia; the relationship between resources is stated bibliographically.

Textual heritage and ethnographic collections. A field devoted to materials related to the Mapuche and Araucania is in preparation. Until an independent corpus is published, it is presented as current editorial work, without a separate resource record.

Economic and financial terminology. A pilot set of sources is being assembled for banking, payment, accounting, and financial terminology. It includes official taxonomies, sector messages, and normative definitions; subject-specific publications remain under the responsibility of their specialist authors.

Publication Forms

Methodological reviews, bibliographies, terminology releases, translations, and corpus notes are published as standalone web documents. Materials joined by a common theme and editorial cycle may be gathered into numbered electronic releases.

This structure makes it possible to develop an almanac or a series of scholarly and reference publications once a stable schedule and editors for thematic sections are in place. Periodicity and format are announced together with the first prepared release.

Relationship with Preparatory Work

Historical documents are described in their original context: exact seminar title, unit, dates, authors, and text status. If particular materials prepared in the environment of the École normale supérieure are connected with the modern specification, the catalogue states the nature of that relationship: source, partial reworking, or bibliographic predecessor.

The modern revision is published and maintained by the Réseau-Observatoire. An institutional archive page preserves a historical document only with the agreement of the relevant unit and with exact attribution.