The main investment involved in allowing your own data to be used by the NITE XML toolkit is the production of a metadata file and the provision of your data in a conformant fashion (especially as regards file-naming). Understanding the format of metadata files will be important if you wish to import your data, though we provide several example metadata files to help. Once you have a metadata file that describes your data, you will be able to use all the NITE tools to validate, analyse and edit your data.
Metadata files describe all aspects of a corpus including:
where on disk the parts of the corpus reside;
the codings that can validly be made on the data;
the observations that have been made already along with their status;
the NITE editors and viewers that can be used on the corpus;
much more (see below).