I am trying to learn about the wonderful compactification for (adjoint) semi-simple groups. Are there any good references that sketch out the full construction other than here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0456? (and the original De Concini Procesi papers)
Thank you!
I know of two more references, but I'm not an expert in the topic, so I don't know how good they will be for you:
Section II.7 in Borel–Ji's Compactifications of Symmetric and Locally Symmetric Spaces discusses the construction, but it is really just an outline that refers to the de Concini–Procesi paper.
Chapter 6 in Brion–Kumar's Frobenius Splitting Methods in Geometry and Representation Theory gives proofs that are written so that the construction works in positive characteristic. I don't recall if that made the proofs more complicated or not. It's probably also worth looking at the references in that chapter, especially in the comments section 6.C.