TCM09: TEI Council Conference Call 27 Jan 04

The following were present: Syd Bauman (SB), Alejandro Bia (AB), David Birnbaum (DB) in part, Lou Burnard (LB), Matthew Driscoll (MD), David Durand (DD), Tomaz Erjavec (TE), Julia Flanders (JF), Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Laurent Romary (LR), Chris Ruotolo (CR; for item 1 only), Susan Schreibman (SS), Natasha Smith (NS), Edward Vanhoutte (EV), Perry Willett (PW), Christian Wittern (CW) (and an unnamed rock band).

Reporting on the status of the Migration Task Force, CR said that the deliverables were all but complete. She anticipated two further weeks work were needed to integrate some text from the Editors and to complete the Tools page. Scripts and stylesheets from case studies needed some work. As regards dissemination, two conference proposals had been submitted so far. Some funding remained, which might be used to implement an online conversion service of some kind. Council members suggested that future maintenance of the project report might be integrated with information about migration from P4 to P5.

Actions from previous meeting were reviewed:

• AB to promote multilingual markup SIG: action completed; work now ongoing in Meta workgroup
• SR (et al) to consult membership on P5 changes: partially completed.
• LB to update web page indexes with date of last component change; technically complex; action abandoned.
• SB to find out about council membership terms: he had discovered the by laws were ambiguous on this, and proposed an amendment to the Board

SR presented a a report from Metaworkgroup which summarized the current state of P5 work and asked for Council's endorsement of the direction taken in defining the new ODD format. He also drew attention to a list of specificproposals which the group wished to refer to Council for decision. Council noted that documentation of how the new ODD format should be deployed was still needed: LB is working on this; the current P5TD chapter simply describe the tags used. Some council members had already tried Roma and wished to provide feedback: it was agreed that this should be rolled out for user testing and feedback as soon as possible. SRasap to set up mailing list for discussion of Roma development. Turning to MEW07, Council reviewed its proposals as follows

• Naming convenion: agreed
• Support for user mods in languages other than RNG : Council recognised that this might be technically difficult, and also that it was unclear to what extent there would be any demand for it. It was suggested that the matter needed further investigation by Meta workgroup, and agreed that better documentation for writers of user mods would help: this might come via the proposed mailing list.
• Review of attribute values to use W3C datatypoes: agreed
• Replacement of text-valued attributes by choice element or equivalent: discussed at some length. Concern was expressed about retaining support for existing, comparatively simple, mechanisms where possible. LB agreed to review the options again.
• Use macros or classes to express content models: agreed
• Make element names unique: agreed
• Drop concept of auxiliary DTD: agreed. Noted that discussion of namespace was not really relevant here.
• Need to verify equivalence of P4 and P5 outputs: agreed
• Move to using P5 Odds as maintenance source as soon as possible: agreed

Finally, returning to MEW08, Council agreed :-

• that the proposed namespace should be adopted
• that conformant documents should specify the version of the TEI to which they conform by means of an attribute named

version

• that its value should follow the pattern

major.minor.micro, with numeric values.

• that guidelines on version numbering should be agreed by the editors and documented asap

• CW presented an update from the Character set workgroup: there had been little activity since the Nancy meeting until recently. A working paper in ODD NG had been circulated very recently, and was yet to be discussed by the group. A revision of the proposed new draft for chapter 4 was also still in progress. At the Nancy meeting, it had been decided to recommend use of xml:lang as a replacement for the global lang. Noting that this decision might be controversial, and might also have forward compatibility issues, Council recommended that a clear rationale for the decision be presented as soon as possible. CW said that it was hoped to have final versions for discussion at the next council meeting in March

• DD gave an update on the Standoff Markup workgroup. Progress on recommendations for Xpointer had been stalled by the decision of W3C not to expand its syntax further to include several necessary features. The workgroup was hoping to develop recommendations in this area in the context of another ISO TC37/SC4 activity, but this was only just starting to get underway. Concern was expressed that P5 should not be delayed as a consequence. Council recommended that the workgroup should finalize its recommendations as far as possible within the context of the existing W3C xpointer() facilities, possibly with some clearly distinguished suggested enhancements that might form the basis of future work in the ISO context. DD was requested to produce a report on current status asap. DD1 Marchcirculate status report to Council by email

• LR reported on the joint ISO/TEI activity on feature structures, which would be meeting next week to finalize their current draft. The whole document needed to be converted to ODD NG format; and it was also necessary to ensure that the document still conformed to ISO norms. Half of the document was derived more or less verbatim from the existing ODDs, and it seemed likely therefore that this would be ready for consideration as part of P5. The other half was tutorial matter which would not be appropriate for P5 in any case.

• Council discussed John Smith's proposal to form a workgroup on problems of word division in Sanskrit. CW felt that the problem area did not relate solely to Sanskrit, and was not really about character encoding but rather about linguistic analysis. SR noted that the output from the proposal would not be a new module, but at most one or two new elements, or recommendations about how to use existing ones, such as a SIG might produce. On balance, Council felt that the most appropriate course would be to set the group up as a task force reporting to Council. CW1 Mar to liaise further with John Smith on proposed task force

• Noting that there were a number of related issues to do with the public perception and marketing of the TEI, it was proposed that some form of marketing committee be set up, drawn from members of the Board and Council. CW? to draft terms of reference and structure for marketing group to Board

• Discussion of how the budget should be allocated was deferred due to lack of time. CW requested that bids for funding from existing or proposed workgroups should reach him by the end of February. All1 Mar 04 submit proposals for funding from Council budget to CW

• It was agreed to aim for another conference call towards the end of March; suggested dates were 23rd and 30th.

CW15 Feb to confirm date of next council call