TEI Technical Council Meeting

The TEI Technical Council held a teleconference on Tuesday 29 February from 18h00 to 19h00 UTC.

Participants: Gabriel Bodard (GB); Brett Barney (BB); Lou Burnard (LB: minutes), James Cummings (JC: chair); Kevin Hawkins (KH); Martin Holmes (MH); Sebastian Rahtz (SR); Paul Schaffner (PS); Rebecca Welzenbach (RW); Stuart Yeates (SY); .

Apologies: Piotr Banski.

Agenda: http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Council#Teleconference_-_Tuesday_28_February_2012_at_18:00_GMT

Brief Reports previously circulated* + KH reported that he and MH were still working on the ideas about bibliographic citation summarized in their article on the wiki + KH's pre-meeting report also addresses the current state of TEI Tite. He believed that the Tite schema as documented at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-exemplars/html/tei_tite.doc.html was now consistent with the Apex DTD, but agreed to check. SR asked whether Tite was defined with reference to a specific version of P5 and if so which. It appears not. This means that there may be unexpected changes when the schema is regenerated against a different version of P5. The schema is defined by inclusion so this will only affect unspecified value or attribute lists however. A question was raised about the ownership of the Apex DTD which Apex are thought to believe to be their property.

KH to investigate and report back at next meeting. + MH's previously circulated report discusses the blacklisting of URLs derived from some TEI identifiers such as #MSAD. After reflection, Council agreed with his recommendation that all existing identifers should be given a unique prefix such as "TEI_" ; it was also agreed that this could be done at the next available release. since it would not involve any schema change. SR and MH to confer on implementation before next P5 release. + KH summarised what was known about the current state of work within Google on producing a TEI conformant version of some large number of scanned Google Books. The algorithms and code concerned were proprietary to Google, but the outputs would be publicly available. No correction of OCR errors in the input text was envisaged. JC reported that he and SR had also been in discussion with Google about making available "good" TEI versions of texts from the Oxford Text Archive. KH reiterated that this project constituted "big news" for the TEI and we should be ready to maximize publicity arising from it. KH was asked to try to find out more about the project as soon as possible, e.g. how many titles were envisaged, and of what quality; were any features for collation or correction of reported errors envisaged? etc + GB spoke to the agenda item concerning the extended pointers workgroup . MH opined that the uses originally proposed for XPointer extensions within the TEI were of little practical use for most TEI users; LB questioned this, citing eg Piotr's use of them in support of stand-off linguistic markup. Syd Bauman had suggested the TEI might improve the situation by funding development of a specialized XInclude processor; others disagreed. MH reported that little was happening on the group's discussion list; it was agreed that the Chair should ask the group to propose a date by when they might have some recommendations for Council's consideration. See further GB's brief post-meeting report. + MH's report summarizes ongoing work in connexion with several SF tickets related to attribute datatypes. He has now checked the proposed datatype of each P5 attribute against its supposed dataDesc, and believes they are now all consistent, with the sole exception of the form attribute on

quotation which has no datatype at all. However since this attribute has been marked as deprecated for several releases, it should probably be removed at the next one. + KH's report touches also on the proposal to revive the Physical Bibliography Workgroup for which a chair had to be found. Council discussed the names proposed, and encouraged KH to pursue these possibilities, and report back as soon as possible. + In his pre-meeting report MH reported that recent work on documenting the TEI release process in better detail appeared to be as complete as was feasible for the moment. RW promptly reported a typo in the document; this has now been fixed. + Following acceptance of the proposed "Future of TEI ODD" panel for the DH2012 conference,

JC asked Council members to suggest other possible participants for a workshop on the Saturday and Sunday following DH2012 on the Future of TEI ODD as soon as possible, so that the work of preparing the workshop (which he is coordinating) might begin. Other business on the agenda* For lack of time, items 2 (discussion of MH's long posting concerning use of ref and key) and 3 (issues raised by the TEI in Libraries Best Practice document) were both deferred to the next meeting. April face to face meeting* The remainder of the meeting was devoted to practical arrangements for the April face to face meeting in Ann Arbor. RW reported that rooms had been now been reserved in the Bell Inn for all Council members. JC asked for input from Council in updating and amplifying the draft agenda topics for the meeting in the Wiki. LB undertook to perform the traditional triage of outstanding sourceforge issues by the third week of March; MH undertook to nag him if this was not done by that date.

Meeting concluded at 19h10, UTC.