Combining Markup Semantics and Semantic Markup: A secret marriage

In the field of humanities computing, textual documents with markup play a crucial role. A sophisticated document grammar like the TEI is a key component for the creation, editing, analysis and interchange of electronic documents. Document grammars describe the syntax of documents. In recent years, a new area of research called "markup semantics" has emerged, which is concerned with the (formal) description of the meaning of these constructs. For example, a element can be used to mark-up paragraphs, but its interpretation as a paragraph is not part of the formal declaration of the element in the document grammar.