TC M12: TEI Council Conference Call 2 Jul 04

The following were present during the call which started at 13:02 UTC: Syd Bauman (SB), David birnbaum (DB), Lou Burnard (LB), Matthew Driscoll (MD), David Durand (DD), Julia Flanders (JF), Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Laurent Romary (LR); Susan Schreibman (SS); John Smith (JS; for first item only), Natasha Smith (NS), Edward Vanhoute (EV); Perry Willett (PW); Christian Wittern (CW).

Alejandro Bia was unable to join the call, being in transit.

• John Smith presented a working paper from the Sanskrit Task Force (http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/CE/cew11.pdf). Its goal was to find an acceptable compromise between making an overly general recommendation and one that was too specific to a particular language or domain. He noted a minor error in the working paper (in exampes [c] and [d], the type attribute with values wordgroup or compound should be supplied on the

sequence element, not on its children). LB asked in what respect the existing general mechanisms for segmentation and analysis (in chapters SA and AI of the Guidelines) were inadequate to the problem in hand, and agreed to demonstrate how they might be used for the cited examples. LB e-mail one of Sanskrit examples re-encoded with <seg> and <ana>. 1 aug 04

Noting that the Taskforce was uneasy with the implied semantics of the choice tag (since the intent in this case was to mark a segmentation plus an interpretation, rather than to present two alternative ways of doing the same thing), LB suggested it might be useful for JS to join the recently-set-up TEI-choice list. LB add JS to TEI-choice discussion list

7 jul 04

LB also asked whether Unicode tokenization was not an adequate way of handling word-segmentation for these languages; CW and JS explained that it was not, because the same character might be shared between two words in a compound. LR noted that ISO TC37/SC4 (http://www.sc37sc4.org) had an active workgroup on morpho-syntactic annotation, which had produced a detailed working paper of relevance to the discussion LR circulate reference to TC37/SC4 workgroup on paper on this issue to council list

7 jul 04 Actions from the previous meeting were reviewed:

• JF reported that the likely cost of trademarking the TEI in the US would be around $700: the Boardhad the matter in hand.
• The call for assistance in drafting the

choice mechanism had been issued on TEI-L in early June. Response had been very good amongst members of the newly set up Digitial medievalist list; in the last few days, a special purpose list on source forge had been set up to work on the proposal (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=tei-choice)

• LR reported that he would be working inter alia on applicability of the TEI terminology proposals to the internationalization of the Guidelines, during his forthcoming visit to Oxford; Alejandro Bia would also be in Oxford at the same time.
• Material not intended for the MS module had been removed from the current draft for the chapter, but not yet added to other parts of the P5 draft: action continues.
• No new written examples had been added to the MS draft, but the existing ones were being revised: action continues: see later agenda item.
• JF reported that she had asked DD for clarification of theis action (registering TEI as a MIME type) and that the process was now in hand: action continues.
• The P5 page on the website had been revised immediately after the Gent meeting: JF expressed thanks to SR.
• LB had drafted a second section in the working paper on current state of TEI P5 (../Drafts/edw81.html) which included the beginnings of the requested list of actions: however, progress on structuring and prioritizing these to form a proper work plan had been held up. Editors agreed that the plan should include some clear milestones. editorswork on project plan in EDW81 2004-08-01

Noting the intention to remove the chapter on the Independent Header, PW commented that members of the Libraries SIG attached considerable importance to the material presently in that chapter about the relationship between the TEI Header and other metadata schemes, which should be maintained and updated. Council noted that there was a need for such comparative information, whether or not the independent header module was retained as a distinct schema. It was agreed that the editors should try to draft a discussion of related issues which might become part of the header chapter or a free standing document.

editors draft document discussing relationship of TEI Header to other meta standards on the basis of material already available, to be handed to the TEI Libraries SIG for improvement and updating. 1 sep 04

• DD gave a brief update on StandOff Markup WG. It was still planned to have a draft of a replacement for chapter SA by end of July. DD and SB would be working on this during July.

• LR reported that the TEI-ISO workgroup meeting planned for the last week of August in Paris would start work on the Feature System Declaration chapter. The technical work on the Feature Structure recommendation for P5 was essentially complete; LR reported that implementors reported no problems after the changes made in Lisbon. Some work remained to be done on the additional tutorial material in ISO DIS 24610, which Kiyong Lee has in hand.

• Reporting from the Manuscript Description Taskforce, MD announcd that a new draft fascicule for P5 was now available on the website (http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/MS/Draft-fs.pdf) together with a brief summary of outstanding issues (http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/MS/msw04.txt). These documents had not yet been reviewed by the other members of the taskforce, but MD was hopeful that this draft could still be completed by mid-July.

• Reporting on progress from the Metalanguage Workgroup, SR highlighted three points:

  • The Durand conundrum first voiced at dinner in Gent had raised some fundamental questions which had been presented to the workgroup for discussion. SR continued to feel that the additional abstract layer provided by the ODD formalism was useful. LB would attempt to address this question in a presentation at Extreme Markup this year.
  • LB had suggested that we might simplify the whole concept of modules by letting each element and class say which module it is a member of. In lieu of disagreement, this has now been implemented. It has some implications for the customization process, which are not yet fully worked out in the TD documentation.
  • A major activity since Gent has been a complete rewrite of Roma, the P5 schema generator (http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Roma) by Arno Mittelbach: this is rewritten in PHP5 and accesses P5 via an eXist database. This implements language customization, creation of customized documentation, and editing of existing customizations (plus the code is available from Sourceforge, of course). The application will be tested by Alejandro during July; it does not yet reflect some of our more recent ideas about customization.LB noted that OUCS was providing the server on which Roma was running on an experimental basis; eventually the TEI would have to consider issues of long term funding and support for its online servers.

The request for feature requests on SourceForge had not met with much response, but the mechanism was available for use. This led to some discussion about ways of improving involvement and awareness of the TEI community in current development activities. It was suggested that a regular news feed from the TEI Chair might be one way of meeting this and JF agreed to look into doing this.

JF to consider drafting of regular news items for distribution to membership, readership of TEI-L, posting as news feed to TEI website.

1 Aug 04

• Reporting on the new Physical Bibliography workgroup, SB said that Terry Catapano had initiated a discussion list (http://listserv.brown.edu/tei-pb.html); that a new European member (Anne-Mette Hansen) had joined the group; and that Terry, Richard Noble, and JF had make a well-received presentation about the workgroup at a recent American Library Association meeting.

• Under AOB, SS reported on expected speakers at the 2004 Members Meeting. It was noted that a single written report from the Council would be made, for which CW needed input from all active workgroups.

all send material for Council report to CW

30 Sep 04

A provisional date of Mon, 20 Sep 04 was set for the next call.