TCM03: TEI Council Conference Call 26 Nov 02

TEI Technical Council: conference call 26 Nov 2002

Lou Burnard

After some initial technical problems caused by LB ill-advisedly trying to use a headset instead of a telephone, the call commenced 1305 GMT, 26 Nov.

The following were present: Syd Bauman (SB), Alex Bia (AB), David Birnbaum (DB), Lou Burnard (LB), Matthew Driscoll (MD), David Durand (DD), Tomaz Erjavec (TE), Merrilee Proffitt (MP), Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Laurent Romary (LR), Chris Ruotolo (CR), Susan Schreibman (SS), John Unsworth (JU), Perry Willett (PW), Christian Wittern (CW).

"In the reports of the workgroups at MM2 in Chicago, and also in the discussions of the migration WG immediately after that, it became clear (at least to me) that there are some architectural decisions that have to be made on the road to P5. It would make the work of these WG's much easier if some of these decisions could be made in a timely way. What I have in mind here are the following issues, but this is just from my own perspective, whereas the problem area is clearly much larger:

- Can we expect entities to be available in P5? Background: The various XML schema languages have to my knowledge decided to abandon entities. What to we do? (My concern is here more with the TEI 'user space', as opposed to the use of entities internal to DTD processing, which probably would not be affected.) One of the many areas affected would be "Section 6.2 Treatment of Punctuation", which will need some revision anyway.

- Should/could P5 limit the content of attribute values to tokens (and similar material) as opposed to the many attribute values in P4, which allow essentially the same content as in PCDATA. Background: Attribute values are different from PCDATA in that they can not contain other markup constructs. This makes it impossible, for example, to specify language, writing system, readings and the like for the content of attribute values. Additionally, there is some area of conflict between XML:lang and language specification in TEI, which could be cleared up as well. To make this possible, things like <corr sic="foo">bar</corr> would have to be expressed as <seg> <corr>bar</corr> <sic>foo</sic> </seg> Since this would require a considerable change to the architecture of TEI and the view of its underlying text (which could not be considered to be 'simply a concatenation of all #PCDATA in a document', I would appreciate a statement from the council on this."

In answer to the question Can we expect entities to be available in P5?, Council noted that P5 would not define entity sets, but that character entities could be declared as a component of any TEI XML document type declaration. In answer to the question Should/could P5 limit the content of attribute values Council requested clarification from the Workgroup as to what was intended. It was suggested that a document recommending best practice with respect to attribute usage would be helpful. DD reported that there was a possibility that the use of SDATA entities within XML might be included in a forthcoming revision of the standard, and that the TEI should be encouraged to join others in expressing this requirement to W3C.

CW and workgroup 31 Janto draft document on attribute usage

TEI in Libraries Working Group

Objectives:

To create a suite of TEI-approved materials and tools to support the use of TEI in a digital library setting, including:

1. A set of guidelines for the use of TEI in libraries, building on the existing document "TEI Text Encoding in Libraries Guidelines" from 1999, and enhancing it by considering library-specific encoding needs and approaches, by updating it to include P4 and XML dtds, and by adding examples and enhanced explanations, recommendations for headers, linking page images to text, use by vendors, etc.; 2. A set of specific dtds for various encoding levels; 3. XSL stylesheets; 4. a working system for search and display, using lightweight, open source components; 5. a set of training documents, with training workshops for librarians.

To do this, the working group will

1. Investigate grant opportunities, particularly with the IMLS for drafting the guidelines, and NEH for training and development activities. (We'll have to restrict the working group to U.S. participants for these grants.) 2. Survey current use of the TEI among digital libraries. We will coordinate with the TEI SGML/XML Conversion Working Group on this activity. 3. Survey development of metadata standards such as METS, MODS, Dublin Core, MARCXML, and others, to give recommendations for their use in conjunction with TEI-encoded files.

Administrative Chair of the workgroup is Perry Willett (Indiana University)

Deadlines * By December 6, working group membership is set. * By January 10, a draft grant proposal for IMLS is finished to be reviewed by working group members. * By January 20, the final draft is readied for submission to IMLS

By March 1, decision to pursue grant funding from the NEH for training component (with a series of short deadlines, ending July 1 with submission of application).

Work via email and perhaps meet as opportunities arise in conjunction with conferences."

Council was very supportive of the proposal, but questioned use of the term workgroup, since the proposal did not involve production of technical input to the Guidelines. Agreed to term it a

task force (the term special interest group was also considered but rejected). It was noted that an explicit association with the TEI of this kind assisted in the project's fundability. Concern was expressed that the group should seek, funding permitting, to involve participation from outside North America.

the DTD for medieval manuscript transcription is now finished and is available, along with instructions on how to use it at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium/transcription.html We would like to submit it formally for vetting by TEI in the hopes of having it adopted as an official DTD. We're pretty happy with it. I just wish that we had a good character set to go along with it. and David Chesnutt MEP materials: the MEP dtds; the MEP guidelines; the MEP tag library; Although developed specifically for the historical editing community, the DTDs are currently being used by similar literary projects like the Mark Twain letters at UCB and the Thomas Carlyle letters at Duke. Needless to say, I'm very pleased to see the work go beyond our small group of historical editors. following some discussion on the TEI-Council list October 23rd et seq. Council noted that the TEI was not, formally, an archive and could not guarantee to maintain materials on its website indefinitely. It was also noted that Faulhaber's request was apparently for some kind of authentication or endorsement of his specific customisation of the DTD, a concept which several members of the Council found problematic. It was noted that the website already provided a showcase for such TEI applications and would be pleased to accept more.