TEI Chair's Report, 2006, DRAFT

TEI Chair's Report, 2006

Chairs: past, present, and future

After serving as TEI-C chair for two years, Julia Flanders took a much-deserved break at the end of 2005 and passed on the TEI-C leadership to Matt Zimmerman, who has served as chair for the past year. With Matt's term on the board expiring on Dec 31st, 2006 a new Chair will be appointed at the board meeting on October 29th, 2006. Many thanks to Julia for her service.

Members' Meeting 2007

The board will select the location of the 2007 Members' Meeting during the board meeting on October 29th, 2006. We have received excellent bids and wish to make a careful choice. A survey was sent out to TEI-L concerning members' meetings' locations. We are using this information to help us make the difficult decisions in choosing future locations. The board is very interested in finding out the opinion of our members and where they would like to see meetings hosted. If you haven't already, please complete the survey.

Membership

As always, member recruitment and retention is of upmost importance to the board, as member fees are our primary source of funding. Last year the board created both a recruitment subcommittee and a fundraising subcommitee. The membership level is good and we are oppearting at budget, but we would like to increase membership to allow flexibility in our activities. The subcomittees will redouble their efforts this year to indentify areas for recruting and fundraising, particulary in geograpchical regions and subject domains underrepresented in the membership.

Guidelines

As the Council Chair's report indicates, much progress was made this year in indenitfying the areas of the P5 Guidelines that need to be developed for it to reach 1.0 status. Though the target of delivering 1.0 at this year's members' meeting was not reached, we are confident it will be delivered in the coming year. Details of the work done on the guidelines can be found in the Council Chair's report. Many thanks to the Council for its determined work.

TEI Tite

Progress has been made towards our goal of producing a subset of the TEI Guidelines for Libraries. Perry Trolard, a graduate student at UIUC, is working on a project to combine the tagsets and schemas at UC, Michigan, Virginia, and one other institution. He will propose a union set of those practices, express it in ODD, and submit it to the Digital Library Federation for approval. Perry will be at the DLF meeting in Boston on Nov. 8-10, with UIUC and DLF splitting the cost. Many thanks to Syd Bauman, John Unsworth, Matthew Gibson, Perry Trolard and the DLF.

MLA's Electronic Textual Editing

We are happy to announce the MLA's publication of Electronic Textual Editing whose editors are John Unsworth, Katherine OBrien OKeefe, Lou Burnard. Included with each book is a CD containing the complete text of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines (P4 edition) in both HTML and PDF formats. Congratulations to John, Lou, and Katherine. Thank you to the MLA.

i18n funding

Last year, the TEI-C submitted a proposal to the Association for Literary and Lingustic Computing (ALLC) to fund a TEI internationalization project. The details of the project can be found here http://www.tei-c.org/I18N/proposal.xml

The goals of the project are:
  • a working architecture for delivering an internationalized TEI
  • an interface for translators to use in creating translated versions of components of the TEI Guidelines
  • translations of the TEI documentation into five languages which the TEI considers to be the highest priority
  • a framework for coordinating further translation efforts to be undertaken on a volunteer basis, or to be supported by further funding if available.

I am happy to announce that the ALLC has accepted our proposal and will fund the project at £10,000. We are very grateful to Harold Short and the executive committee of the ALLC for their generosity. Many thanks to Sebastian Rahtz for his leadership of this project and all of the translators who have already done work on translating the TEI.

Website

Chris Ruotolo is in the process of developing a new website for the TEI-C. Content is being revised and a new backend is being developed using OpenCSM. The deadline has not been set but we are hoping to unveil a new site in a few months. The goal is to provide better and more logically organized content and an improved user interface. many Thanks to Chris, Amit Kumar, and Shayne Jordan for their work on this project.

TEI Day in Kyoto

In conjunction with the 2006 Technical Council meeting, the TEI participated in a TEI Day in Kyoto hosted by Kyoto University. The one-day event consisted of presentations by by local TEI users in Japan and Technical Council members, as well as a poster session. Papers were delivered in both English and Japanese. Kyoto University generously funded 5 of the Technical Council members to travel to Japan and we are grateful to Kyoto University and Christian Wittern for this excellent outreach opportunity.

ISO/TEI agreement

This year the TEI has reached an agreement with the ISO concerning ISO/TC 37/SC 4 Language resource management. This agreement formalizes the intention of ISO/TC 37/SC 4 and TEI to co-operate and to enable the development of the future ISO 24610 series of International Standards and other related standards. The general principles of the aggrement are:

  • TEI seeks to develop joint standards with ISO/TC 37/SC 4 on Feature Structure representation and Feature system declaration.
  • ISO/TC 37/SC 4 seeks to access relevant international user specifications as input to the ISO standards development process.
  • TEI and ISO/TC 37/SC 4 wish to harmonize and agree their respective work programmes and to set up a coordination group to handle issues under this agreement.
  • TEI and ISO/TC 37/SC 4 wish to achieve mutual benefit from sharing the expertise of domain experts of the two organisations and they welcome cross-project participation where appropriate.

Many thanks to Lou Burnard and Laurent Romary for their work on this.