One of the immediate working goals of the Metalanguage committee is the establishment of ways of translating between a wide variety of existing text encoding schemes and the SGML-based tag schemes to be produced by the other working committees (see document ML W11 (Statement of work)). Clearly, to define in advance detailed translation mechanisms for every possible encoding scheme would be impossible; equally clearly to choose only those schemes which are most widely used or only those which pose interesting technical problems would be inadequate to the broad aims of the TEI. Instead, we propose to select for further study a sample of encoding schemes. To assist in this selection procedure, a long list of encoding schemes was drawn up by the Metalanguage Committee, and each scheme categorised as follows:

1. Category A The Metalanguage Committee expects to study these schemes intensively with a view to providing sample specifications for transforming texts using them to the TEI scheme.
2. Category B No additional study of these schemes is anticipated, as it is believed that mechanisms developed for schemes in Category A will be adequate for these schemes also.
3. Category C No transformation mechanisms for these schemes will be developed at this time.

Volunteers wishing to work on schemes either not listed here or assigned to category C will of course be welcome to do so.