TCM10: TEI Council Conference Call

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), Susan Schreibman (SS), Natasha Smith (NS), Edward Vanhoutte (EV), Perry Willett (PW), Christian Wittern (CW).

Apologies had been received from Laurent Romary; DB joined the meeting half way through after an unfortunate elevator-related incident.

Actions from previous meeting were reviewed:

• [3] Roma development list has been established and seen a little traffic.
• [5] No further progress from the SO group and no report submitted. On today's agenda.
• [7] CW reported that John Smith had set up a workgroup on Sanskrit encoding issues, which was likely to deliver recommendations of more general scope. LB reported that the group seems to have independently re-invented the choice mechanism. CWASAP request Sanskrit WG to produce a report for consideration at the Council meeting in May.
• [8] CW reported that, on further consideration, he felt these topics were better left to the Board. No one disagreed.
• [9] CW reported that so far only the Meta workgroup had requested funding. Of the $20k allocated for workgroup activities in the current year, about half was currently uncommitted..

• CW reported on the CE workgroup's output. Council reviewed CEW06 and endorsed it as a replacement for the current WSD chapter in P5, with the proviso that some better name than "WSD-NG" be found. At its last meeting, the WG agreed that a statement about the role of xml:lang in P5 would be useful. It was suggested this might fit into the document CEW04, work on which seemed to have stagnated.

EditorsImmediatelyattempt to re-establish contact with Michael Beddows

• Council noted with concern the continued lack of progress from the StandOff Workgroup, for which DD accepted responsibility. Over the weekend, SB had formulated a work plan for addressing the most urgent needs, which he volunteered to work closely with DD on accomplishing. The workplan is summarized in a note, details of which had yet to be agreed by the workgroup, but which mostly involve SB and DD working closely on some existing documents. DDimmediately Post to TEI-SOM new plan of action

SB & DD 2004-04-06 Write up draft of main XPointer recommendations

2004-05-06SB & DD Write up draft of main portions of SO W 03

Noting that getting another person up to speed in time for P5 would be difficult, and that other wg members (e.g. Fabio Vitale) were just as short of time, Council agreed in principle to this plan, on the assumption that SB and DD would meet regularly, and that LB and JF would monitor progress.

• In the absence of LR, LB reported progress in the joint ISO/TEI feature structure group. The recent Korean meeting had been very productive, and a fairly complete draft agreed. Some issues were still under debate within the group (notably the best way of representing re-entrant structures) but it was still planned to have a final draft for consideration by the Council in May. Several members of the group would be meeting informally at the LREC conference in Lisbon shortly before the next Council Meeting and any outstanding problems should be resolved by that date. A further meeting of the ISO TC37/WG4 was planned for Paris in August, which LB planned to attend. DD noted that the document FSW01 did not give any rationale for or discussion of the changes made between P4 and P5,being simply a summary. More discussion is available in the draft; LB also noted that a list of implementations of the current P4 system was included as an ISO deliverable, so liaison with that user community should not be too difficult.

• MD reported that the group had mostly been waiting for the ODD format to stabilize so that a new draft could be prepared. LB had only recently converted the existing Master documentation to the new format; once this was done it was planned to start implementing the basic revisions agreed at the Reykjavik meeting. This would be completed before any further expansion of content, and would be ready in time for the May meeting. LB Draft proposals from Reykjavik in new ODD format

2004-04-15

• SR reported that the Metalanguage workgroup had held a very productive meeting in Paris, following which the ODD language had been further revised. The new draft for TD was well on course for P5, and the editorial toolkit was now functional (i.e. the draft TD document generates schemas and DTDs which validate it). Some more implementation work remained for TEI customizations, but the basic mechanism was now in place. It had also been agreed that internationalization would use the same mechanism as customization.

SR was confident that the work would be complete by early May. Council members were urged to study this documentation, since it is the one part of the TEI which all future developers and workgroup heads need to understand fully.

It was suggested that additional tutorial material should be prepared to complement the basic reference material in this draft. JF mentioned that the

WWP Encoding Guide was currently being revised and would include a section on P5 migration, which might usefully include a layman's explanation and case study on how to do customization. SR suggested that the Ibsen project also had a major customization and that he had been working with Tone Merete Brevik on porting this to P5.

SR 1 May 04 to produce documentation of a few simple customizations using the new facilities

• Council then discussed the proposal for a new workgroup on Physical Bibliography, previously circulated by JF. Its main objective would be detailed recommendation for the encoding of collation formulae and of the phenomena corresponding with them in running text. Council discussed possible synergy with the work of the MS group and other projects, and approved formation of the group conditional on further clarification of its exact remit. DB would be visiting Brown mid-April and would be able to contribute his own experience to the project.

DB ASAP Send details of previous completed work on encoding of collation sequences to JF.

JF 2004-04-15 Draft and circulate to Council a proposed charge to the Physical Bibliography workgroup

• Under AOB, there was some discussion of future meetings:
  • The 2004 Members' Meeting will be held at John's Hopkins on 22 & 23 Oct. MD will be doing a workshop there in April.
  • EV had prepared a website with details of accomodation etc. for the Council face to face meeting in May. He would investigate possibility of group hotel rates. SS requested that all documents for the meeting be made available on the website well in advance, i.e. by 06 May at the latest.