While working together on a TEIcompliant interchange format for Ancient Egyptian-Coptic textual resources (see section 4.2), a group of shared concerns on the topic arose from the topographical orientation of the former and the textual dimension of the latter.
9The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, we provide a definition of the four main conceptual elements of the data model, namely Object, Document, Witness, and Text, and we describe how they relate to one another. Metadata that apply to these elements and relationships are then discussed in section 2. Section 3 is devoted to a brief discussion of the advantages of this data model in terms of localization of written production. The links between the TDM and other conceptual models (as well as TEI elements) are presented in section 4. The conclusions provide perspectives concerning the online resources that would allow a linked open data implementation of the model in Egyptology. In this section, we take as a point of departure the definitions of the four key elements of the TDM and we proceed with a discussion of their relationships.
The Conceptual Data Model11 These elements are:• Object, which refers to a physically discrete material object (in its present state, based on current available evidence);
12• Document, which refers to an artefact reconstituted in its original entirety (i.e. materially made up of 1 to n Objects) and envisioned as an idealized writing space or text support;
13• Witness, which refers to a single occurrence of a Text, in its material (and more broadly philological) dimensions, on 1 to n Document;
14• Text, which refers to a textual composition as it can be reconstructed from (the compilation of 1 to n) Witness(es).
159 A first paper on the topic was presented at the Text encoding initiative conference and members ' meeting 2015 (October 28-31, Lyon -France) by L. Coulon, F. Elwert, E. Morlock, S. Polis, V. Razanajao, S. Rosmorduc, S. Schweitzer, and D. Werning. 10 The basic elements introduced in this section (as well as their relationships) were first presented in an internal report of the Ramses Project by T. Gillen, St. Polis, and N. Sojic, Metadata: A progress report for the Ramses Project (2014/05/14).11 These four elements are identified (although with other labels) by Morlock and Santin, 'The inscription between text and object' (n. 7, above) 141 (see n. 12-15, below). The main originality of the TDM lies, therefore, in the explicit definition of all the possible types of relationships between these elements.12 Compare with the 'physical object part' defined as 'a detachable physical part of a material object that can be physically isolated' in Morlock and Santin, 'The inscription between text and object' (n. 7, above) 341.13 Compare with 'text-bearing object' defined as 'a material object that bears one or several inscribed texts' in Morlock and Santin, 'The inscription between text and object' (n. 7, above) 341. Note that Document is explicitly defined in the TDM in relation to a writing space. No matter how i...