TEI Technical Council Meeting,

Present: Brett Barney (BB), Lou Burnard (LB), James Cummings (JC; Chair), Kevin Hawkins (KH), Martin Holmes (MH; minutes), Paul Schaffner (PS), Rebecca Welzenbach (RW)

Apologies: Gabriel Bodard (GB), Sebastian Rahtz (SPQR), Piotr Banski (PB)

Actions Arising

Brief Reports

TEI Tite (KH)

KH has been trying to synchronize the Apex and TEI versions of Tite. There are things in the Apex prose docs that don't match their DTD, but Apex will accept a new DTD whenever we provide it, so KH suggested we just give them the latest version. According to SR, there is only one difference between the actual DTDs. LB: Should we give them a new ODD + schema, or just a DTD? If we give them both, then the ODD should provide documentation to replace theirs. KH: Their documentation is different and a bit more thorough and precise than ours. LB: We should take their documentation and place it in our ODD, if they'll allow us to do so. KH will look more closely at this.

SIG Reports (JC)

JC already circulated a report to the Council list. Some SIGs have responded, others not. This is available on the tei-council mailing list at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2012/016088.html. KH reports from the Libraries SIG: they are beginning a study of the library community to see how/whether they are using TEI and how well TEI is meeting their needs. The results will be presented at TEI and at another conference in the fall. Question for Council: we agreed in Ann Arbor that KH should go through the Best Practices document and create tickets based on it. He hasn't started that yet, but proposes asking members of the

TEI for Libraries list to help. For this, he'd like either a category or a group in SF for those tickets. LB: what sort of tickets would arise out of this? It sounds more like a tutorial for fine-tuning the TEI for libraries. JC: There's already a category in SF for TEI Guidelines Documentation. JC: Making a category is permanent is SF, so we should probably avoid making new ones that would only be of temporary value. KH withdrew the idea in the light of this. But if someone can come up with a category that means “not ready for Council consideration yet”, then that might be handy. LB suggests using a wiki to create the list of topics and issues, and then create tickets from that.

JC mentioned ongoing board discussions about reforming the way SIGs worked and that currently the SIG Rules http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/rules.xml say that “a single ‘SIG Coordinator' is appointed by the Council from among its members”. He has suggested (and will suggest again to the board) that it should not be limited to the Council Membership.

Google Books (KH)

KH has obtained samples of Google TEI output and circulated them to Council, but nobody has had a chance to look at them yet. KH will remind Council to do this.

Physical Bibliography (KH)

In Paris we thought it would be a good idea to revive the PB working group, and there are complaints that TEI inadequately serves the PB community for printed books. KH has found Annika Rockenberger who is willing to serve as leader of the working group, and has asked her to formulate a plan that he can bring to Council for approval. Hopefully this will be available for the September F2F.

ODD Meeting after DH2012 (JC)

A brief report has been sent to the Council list http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2012/016074.html; JC summarized its contents. LB noted that the report needs to be condensed into some take-home messages. MH wondered Re: the Roma issue: was it mainly the web interface or the back-end? JC noted that everyone there agreed that there should be a second, independent implementation of Roma. But SR is mainly concerned that we need an new web interface that handles more of the ODD functionality.

Action: JC will be producing a clearer, more summary, report or the face2face meeting.

XPointer scheme proposal (GB)

GB was unable to connect owing to telephonic difficulties. MH and LB discussed the XPointer scheme proposal written by Hugh Cayless for the benefit of council. MH finds it hard to advocate for it since he is worried about the scale and ambition of it, and not sure whether, in the end, it would be useful or much used. It is suggested PB should see if this fits his use-cases. MH suggests only looking at those pointer schemes which are actually in use in the wild, but the proposers want to handle theoretical ones. Not enough Council members had yet read the proposal which is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JsMA-gOGrevyY-crzHGiC7eZ8XdV5H_wFTlUGzrf20w/edit. More discussion is needed on council list, and feeding back of any suggestions to the creators of the proposal in case they wish to modify it before the next council FTF meeting.

Face2Face Meeting: arrangements (JC)

Reminder to put these things into diaries so no conflicts arise. JC will provide lots more info for everyone nearer the time. LB: Where are the meetings? JC: IT Services and Wolfson College. We can't have it all in either place because of conflicts. KH looks forward to visiting the fabled OUCS-that-was. JC promises a tour with highlights like "This is where Lou's office used to be". Everyone needing accommodation says they've already booked it.

Replacement for Stuart Yeates or not? (JC)

JC thanks Stuart for all his hard work over the last couple of years. The consensus on the Council list was that since SY's term was up at the end of the year, it's not worth looking for a short-term replacement. KH would like to see the Board clarify this in the bylaws, so that there would be a clear path forward in this kind of situation in future. LB suggests that JC propose to the Board that if only three months or less is left before an election, someone leaving should not be replaced. JC will suggest to the Board that they clarify this.

TEI Lite (LB)

LB has done a lot of changes and updates to TEI Lite. He still needs to clarify with SR and others regarding testing etc.; if it remains part of the build process, it will need to be tested during building, but if it's “archived” in the sense of being moved to the Vault, this would be unnecessary. MH suggests it should be formally removed from the release package after the next release, but LB thinks this is a bad idea, and will not win us friends. KH points out that if the @source attribute is added to the schemaSpec element, the build process would always use a previous version of TEI to build it, and therefore it wouldn't need updating. JC reminded Council that it might still build differently if we were to make changes in the stylesheets or the build process. MH noted likewise that if the ODD specification and ODD processing changes, this will break Lite. LB suggested an example of the sort of thing we want to stop doing is this: we have just added into Lite some completely new features, such as the use of @facs. We should not be doing that, but we should be continuing to build it and make sure that it works. KH asked Could we add something into the build process that pulls an archived version from the Vault and adds it into the release package? JC thought that it shouldn't be a problem to do this and doing the same for the Oxygen framework. JC thinks it should still be made available in the way it currently is, even if behind the scenes (via an Apache rewrite or symlink, like the Guidelines as a whole) it comes from the Vault. LB noted that apart from that, changes are good and the result is useful, so the archiving/maintenance issue is the only remaining one.

Once this work on Lite is finished, a similar process will be applied to Tite.

Actions: MH will summarize the options to the Council list, as a way of kick-starting the discussion of archiving etc.

Reminder to finish off Ann Arbor Actions (JC)

Go to the wiki page of actions from Ann Arbor, and for anything that's assigned to you and not done, do it. Be told. Do as JC says, and not as he apparently does. Let's clear this list ahead of the face-to-face meeting if we can.

MH suggested that any items which are still outstanding which are not tickets should be turned into tickets by their assignees, and assigned to themselves. LB noted that re: multimedia, nobody has done anything on this yet, but in the meantime, LR and some German people have got together on an ISO activity to harmonize some existing standards, which they would like to standardize in the form of an ODD file. They are looking at the existing standards for transcription of speech and video. There is an article in jTEI by Thomas Schmidt which addresses this issue very well (http://jtei.revues.org/142). If that workgroup does what it proposes, then we will have one answer to this ticket. LR has asked if someone from Council could attend their meetings, and LB is willing to attend as representative. Everyone agrees this would be a good idea.

JC notes that we have done very well in keeping expenses down, and if we can continue to do that, we might be able to fund a code bounty potentially for a rewrite of the Roma interface. JC thanks Lou for being a good bloke and attending the workgroup meeting in November

New Business Arising

None was raised by Council. JC thanked everyone for attending.