TCM04: TEI Council Conference Call 21 Jan 03

The following were present: Syd Bauman (SB), David Birnbaum (DB), Lou Burnard (LB), Matthew Driscoll (MD), David Durand (DD), Tomaz Erjavec (TE), Laurent Romary (LR), Susan Schreibman (SS), John Unsworth (JU), Perry Willett (PW), Christian Wittern (CW).

Actions from previous meeting (15 minutes):
- Syd was to have revised his notes of the meeting on 26 June. Deemed to be done, or no longer relevant.
- Lou and John to resolve the technical editor position, for SGML migration workgroup. Sarah Wells would be working as technical author for Chris Ruotolo and the Migration Workgroup. LB noted that the wider issue of support for TEI website authoring was still to be addressed.
- Christian and workgroup to have drafted document on attribute usage -- Christian reports that this has been held up: ‘As there are still some open issues on this and other topics in the WG, I would like to postpone this discussion until we have a clearer picture of how the outcome of this question will relate to our recommendations.’. A date of Jan 31 was agreed.
- All of us were ‘to articulate namespace policy and review P5 contents’ by this time. Not done. See further item 3, below.
- Joint ISO-TEI activity on Feature Structures. LR and LB had been discussing this. The plan is to propose a revision of the current TEI chapters on feature structures and feature systems declarations as a new work item for ISO TC37/SC4. The work would be carried out within a joint TEI/ISO work group, and is summarized in two documents circulated earlier to the council in draft form, which are to be made available on the website shortly.
  Action 1: LB23 Jan Retag and edit draft documents on FS WG
  . Council approved this work item in principle, and would review the draft work plan as soon as possible. The proposal has to be submitted to ISO by end February.
  Action 2: All 14 Feb Review proposal for FS WG and send comments to list
  Council noted that participation in ISO workgroups had to be self-funding. LR was asked to provide an estimate of the likely cost to the TEI of its participation.
  Action 3: LR31 Jan provide estimated budget for TEI participation in proposed FS WG
Editors' proposal for handling nontrivial changes to the Guidelines. Council proposed this should be put into action, but requested clarification as to whether it was intended to use a ‘rolling submission’ model (whereby editors would collect proposals and act on them periodically) or a rapid response model (where proposals would be acted on individually). CW asked whether tei-tech would be preferable to tei-l as a vehicle for discussion of such proposals. LB and JU felt that there should be only one list.
Action 4: Editors28 FebRevise EDW78 and circulate new draft for approval
Review of workplan and timetable for TEI P5 (held over from last meeting). Council felt that it needed more information about the implications of the various technical choices proposed here and in Sebastian's email before the meeting. It was agreed to form a special task force to work on the issues and make specific technical proposals. Sebastian was nominated for chair; DD, LR, CW volunteered to serve. A progress report would be needed at the next call.
Action 5: SPQR20 Feb Form new work group on architectural issues and report back at next conference call.
Status of Manuscript description work (held over from last meeting). JU reported that he had written to Consuelo Dutschke, but that she had been taken seriously ill. He had also spoken (again) to Merrilee Proffit and received email from Ambrosio Piazzoni. He suggested extending the deadline for a submission from the TEI MSS WG until the end of February. Council felt that this would not be appropriate, since the deadline had already been extended twice. Instead, it was agreed that the Council should constitute a new task force, jointly chaired by MJD and MP, charged with harmonization of the various proposals in this area as rapidly as possible. David Birnbaum was also volunteered to join the new group.
Action 6: JU 31 Jan to write to CD and AP, requesting them to submit the current state of their work to the new task force

Action 7: MJD31 Jan to draft a charge for the new taskforce and circulate to the Council
.
Progress on IMLS proposal. PW briefly reported that the proposal was on schedule for submission to IMLS by deadline of 1 Feb. Both he and JU expressed optimism about the outcome of the proposal.
New workgroup on SVG and chapter on Trees/Graphs proposed by Patrick Durusau. Council agreed that the question of whether or not the current chapter on Trees and Graphs should be retained or revised was distinct from the question of how to integrate other XML schemes such as SVG. It was agreed to ask Patrick to constitute a task force which should review current work in formalization of tree and graph structures, and make a specific recommendation with regard to the current chapter of the Guidelines. He should solicit interest in this work on TEI-L; it was suggested that Chris Catton (on the SO markup wg) would be a useful contributor.
Action 8: JU31 Jan To convey Council's view on proposed wg on trees and graphs to PD
Selection of chair for group to work on Core Tags and Schema. Council agreed that this should be a task for the group already proposed for Sebastian.
Update from character encoding workgroup. CW reported that the group was drafting a proposal concerning a replacement for SDATA entities which it was intended to submit to W3C, hopefully with the support of the TEI. This would be available for comment by the end of January.
Action 9: All15 FebTo review and comment on CE WG's proposals concerning SDATA when available.
The wg was also working on two other documents, one to replace the current chapter 4 of P4, and the other to define ‘next generation WSDs’. These drafts should be ready for submission by the end of April. No further meetings of the group were planned.
Update from Standoff Markup Workgroup. DD reported that drafts of several documents were starting to be circulated on the workgroup's discussion list. A new document was planned on the rationale behind some of the recommendations.
Action 10: Editors31 Jan to make wg drafts available on website
The full workgroup on SGML/XML migration was due to meet in College Park in early February. Chris Ruotolo would report on its progress at the next meeting.
Date of next conference call: 18 March, at the same time. The Council would next meet face to face in Oxford, May 16-17.
Action 11: LB/SPQR31 Jan check arrangements for Oxford meeting
Any Other Business. LB said that he was chairing the Programme Committee for this year's Digital Resources in the Humanities Conference, to be held at the University of Gloucestershire's Cheltenham campus 31 Aug to 3 Sept, and that TEI submissions would be very welcome.