Representation of overlapping structures

Markup of overlapping structures is, depending on your point of view, either a perpetual hot topic or a trivial edge case in the study of markup. Starting from the belief that overlapping structures are not just common but important, not only in the analysis of literary works but also in the management of changing content, we explore ways to represent overlapping structures in tractable ways. The requirements for representing overlapping structures differ from those for storing simple tree-structured information. An exploration of these requirements is followed by a detailed description of one way to represent Goddag structures in relational form.