Seals are the only remnants of the written documents used for daily administration and private correspondence from the 4th to the 15th C. in the Byzantine Empire – i.e. the Christian eastern medieval empire centred upon Constantinople – whose public and private archives are nearly entirely lost. As such seals do not supplement archival material but have to substitute it, which explains the unique importance of sigillography for Byzantine studies.

SigiDoc provides XML-based and TEI-compliant encoding standards for the description and edition of Byzantine seals: as such, it aims to establish a set of rules and guidelines to publish Byzantine seals in digital form. SigiDoc is intended for both the creation of digital-born editions as well as digital conversion of paper publications and has been conceived to provide the users with a common basis for developing their projects and to give them the freedom to customise their approach.

SigiDoc is largely based on the ongoing experience of EpiDoc and aims at becoming the standard tool for the spreading of digital sigillography while delivering a standard for the digital encoding of Byzantine seals.