The Text Alignment Network (TAN) is a suite of highly regulated XML formats intended to allow scholars to align and share texts and textual analysis at a maximal level of syntactic and semantic interoperability. TAN is particularly suited to textual works with multiple versions (translations, paraphrases), and to expressing quotations, word-for-word alignments, and grammatical features.
TAN files are simple, modular, and networked, allowing users, working independently and collaboratively, to edit, study, and annotate shared files. The extensive validation rules depend upon a library of functions that definitively interpret the format, thereby helping anyone studying or editing the files, and providing a foundation for customized tools and applications.
Although expressive of scholarly nuance and complexity, the TAN format has been designed to benefit everyone, scholars and non-scholars alike, and can be used broadly for multilingual publishing, language learning, and machine translation.