Our study addresses current uncertainty in digital content design by investigating and contributing to the development of methods for interpreting and understanding the markup that is applied to digital objects. We propose that making sense of the digital content object requires an understanding of the static object and its properties as they occur in different stages of development. The paper presents a model for the analysis of content through a sequence of transitory states that is based on IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
The research project aims to explore methods for the analysis of encoding practice and to investigate the viability of a common model for constructing digital content objects. The analysis of encoded documents is being supported by the development of analytical software that reports on markup usage (i.e. the occurrence of tags used) in batches of encoded documents. By interpreting and reporting on the markup applied within documents it should be possible to comment on the implementation of markup languages and metadata schemas.
It is envisioned that over time, the development of analytical methods and quantitative procedures for markup analysis will contribute to:  managing changing standards (e.g. identifying redundant and changing elements within documents);  comparing, synchronising and merging different information sets;  educating and training users involved in the design and development of markup based systems; and  supporting research activities specific to organizational content or academic enquiry. The presentation will focus on the conceptual state model we propose, a demonstration of the markup analysis software and markup usage reports from the project.