The paper describes the special interest in edition by historians and the resulting editorial practice in contrast to the methods applied by pure philological textual criticism. The interest in historical ‘facts’ suggests methods trying to create formal representations of the information conveyed by the text in structured databases. This can be achieved with RDF representations of statements extracted from the text, by automatic information extraction methods or by hand. The paper suggests the use of embedded RDF representations in TEI mark-up, following the practice in several recent projects and concludes with a proposal for a definition of the ‘assertive edition’.