Another potential museum application of SGML is as an interchange and delivery format. If one museum wants to send information to another (for example, details of objects it is proposing to loan), it can be converted from the source institution's internal format to SGML, transmitted, and then converted to the recipient's internal format on receipt.
This model has the benefit that each participant in the exchange only has to set up two conversion protocols, between their internal storage format and the SGML-based interchange format, in order to exchange information with an arbitrary number of other institutions.
In the same way, SGML has recently been mooted as a vehicle for delivering controlled vocabularies and thesauri. At the Museum Documentation Association's terminology workshop last year it was agreed that the TEI's Terminology Interchange Format (an International Standard in its own right) could potentially be used for this purpose. With a suitable application of HyTime independent links, it is even possible to send updates to a thesaurus in SGML format.
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Contact Robin Cover with corrections and updates, or to submit contributions to the ISUG online document database.
