TCM08: TEI Council Conference Call 23 Sep 03

xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"??oxygen RNGSchema="http://www.tei-c.org/cms/system/modules/org.tei.www/_common/schemas/teilite.rnc" type="compact"??Lou BurnardFor distribution to TEI Council members for corrections; corrected version to TEI website.

From Lou's manuscript notes

Converted to P5First draftThe following were present: Syd Bauman (SB), Alejandro Bia (AB), David Birnbaum (DB) in part, Lou Burnard (LB), David Durand (DD), Tomaz Erjavec (TE), Susan Schreibman (SS), Perry Willett (PW), Christian Wittern (CW).

Apologies for absence: Sebastian Rahtz (SR; in transit); Matthew Driscoll (MD; power failure in Scandinavia) and Laurent Romary (LR; mistake over date).

Actions from previous meeting not covered on today's agenda:

In Chris Rutolo's absence, AB and SS reported progress from the Migration Work Group. There had been a very productive meeting in Alicante. Sarah Wells, the group's technical author, was in the process of copy-editing the many short work papers into a single coherent report. A first draft of the project's final reports had been circulated and would shortly appear on the web site. Discussion about work to be carried out in the remainder of the project was ongoing: it had been suggested that a survey of TEI activity would be most useful.

In this context, but more generally, CW remarked that it would be very helpful if dates of uploading could be added for all documents referenced on the website. LB noted that all individual documents already carried their dates of last revision but that this might be a useful enhancement for the website. LBASAPto check feasibility of updating web index pages with dates of last update for individual documents

In SR's absence, LB reported that the Metalanguage work group was continuing to work along the lines indicated in its previous report. It was planned to hold a face-to-face meeting in Oxford 15-17 October; an informal meeting with two members who could not make that date would also be held on the 9th. CW reported that there had been little activity in the Character Encoding workgroup since the last meeting, though there had been some testing of the proposals discussed at the last meeting, and (a few days ago) some further comments on CEW06 had been received. It was planned to hold a face-to-face meeting before the Members Meeting, to plan completion of the group's work. DD reported that progress in the Standoff workgroup had been rotten. He would make a further effort to motivate the group into finishing the work done so far, which was still close to completion, and addressed the original charge of the group. The group's mode of operation, exclusively relying on regular phone calls, had not proved to be very effective, although it had the merit of low cost. Council noted the importance of having evidence of some completed work, however small, in time for the Members Meeting. In LR's absence, LB reported that the Joint ISO TEI activity on Feature Structures was continuing along the lines indicated in its charge. A discussion list had been set up, and a preliminary review of the draft made. The chair of the activity, Keeyong Lee, would be co-ordinating comments received on the draft. It was planned to hold a face-to-face meeting in Nancy 4-5 November. Concerns were raised about IP issues in the work, and about transparency of the consultation process. [These issues have since been discussed briefly with LR who will take them forward within ISO TC4/SC8] Council noted that at this year's members meeting, the oral reports from workgroups and council would be replaced by a TEI Question Time session, in which work group heads and council members would be expected to field questions from the floor, based on a previously-submitted written report. It was proposed that this report should contain brief activity reports from each workgroup including lists of documents produced, training activities, etc. and also a timeline. After discussion, it was agreed that WG heads would be responsible for drafting input for this document, possibly with help from other group members, and submitting that to the council chair, who would merge the results to form a single document to be passed to the editors. A timetable was agreed for this, which would ensure the document was ready for circulation at least one week before the meeting. All WG/taskforce heads15 Oct 03send draft reports to CWCW21 Oct 03send draft report to editorsEditors24 Oct 03finalize report and circulate to membershipLB reported that several proposals for SIGs had been made, formally or informally, and that it might be necessary to expand the number of parallel strands for them from two to three. He would check with LR to see whether this would be possible at ATILF [it is]. So far proposals had been mooted for SIGs on libraries, on TEI multilinguality, on training, on editing of modern manuscripts. [Since the meeting, three further proposals have been suggested: one on medieval manuscript description and digitization, one on language engineering, and one on graphic elements]Discussion of the date of the next meeting revealed some uncertainty about when council members' terms expired, which SB agreed to resolve. SB1 Oct to advise council members of agreed principles concerning membership term. It was agreed that since most council members would be attending the Members Meeting, the next formal meeting should be timetabled for some time in January. CW1 Dec to decide date of next council call