TEI Council Meeting

The TEI Council teleconference meeting took place on Tuesday 7 October 2008 at 13:00 UTC.

Participants: Gabriel Bodard (GB), Peter Boot (PB, minutes), Tone Merete Bruvik (TMB, briefly), Lou Burnard (LB), Arianna Ciula (AC), James Cummings (JC), Dan O’Donnell (DO, briefly), Elena Pierazzo (EP), Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Laurent Romary (LR, Chair), Paul Schaffner (PS), and John Walsh (JW).

Council members unable to participate: David Sewell.

Notes in wiki

LR asks whether there are problems with using the Council Wiki space to make notes for upcoming meetings. No-one has objections.

Minutes meeting 21 August 2008

Approved.

TEI P5 Bugs and Feature Requests from SourceForge

LB notes:

• there have been 4 new items since the previous meeting; they presented no special difficulties and the team at Oxford has dealt with them;
• the ‘green’ items (see list at ) have been dealt with according to the decisions taken at the last teleconference;
• of the ‘amber’ items, issue 2055864 (Remove redundant iso-* attributes) needs more work to determine exactly which attributes are redundant;
• of the ‘red’ items:
  • 1891589 (sequenceOptional (etc.?) disrupt ‘may contain’ ref. info) and 2021933 (egXML content model) have been dealt with;
  • 1925127 (Provide discussion of taxonomical names) needs more work, and as Council we probably do not have the necessary expertise; LB will draw up a problem statement, LR will ask for volunteers on TEI-L
  • 1933198 (<precision> element needed): GB and JC did some work on this, but there is not as yet a finished proposal. GB and LB will discuss this further
  • 2002418 (New element = <clarification>?): there is a proposal from the Ibsen project. EP will take ownership of it

We will produce a new release before the members meeting. We shouldn’t introduce further changes in the specifications, to avoid breaking things. Textual changes to the

can be made up to a week before the meeting.

A Korean translation will be added in the forthcoming release.

Council report at the London Meeting

LR’s draft for the report is discussed. The draft looks good. A few remarks are made:

About the SIG’s: not all SIG’s are created equal. Some SIG’s are mainly a support group for the community (EP); other SIG’s are expected to come up with proposals for changes to the

. LR: In the latter case, a Council liaison person is necessary, but the liaison is not necessarily the SIG chair. Nevertheless all currently existing SIG’s have a Council liaison: correspondence (DS), Manuscripts (EP), Physical bibliography (PS), Libraries (JW), Music (GB), Text and Graphics (JW), Ontologies (AC) and (not yet official) Scientific Bibliography (LR).

About the plans for the future: PB suggests the term ‘P6’ is to be avoided. We shouldn’t suggest another release that breaks backward compatibility is in the works. AC mentions (and mails after the meeting) other possible lines of expansion: recommendations on integrating with/mapping to other standards, collection of style sheet templates by module and connection to other outreach projects. LR asks for more input on plans for the future. ALL: provide input to LR.

There will be more time available for the Council report than before, as the voting and counting no longer takes place during the business meeting. LR and DO will discuss the schedule.

TEI releases and versions

There were a couple of inconsistencies or limitations in the way we announce or identify new TEI versions. The package names at SF were not very clear; SR fixed that. Schema’s now also mention the TEI version that they are based on. Remaining issues: Roma does not say which TEI version it is based on (after the meeting PB added bug number 2152071 in SF) and we should decide whether we want to use the SF News mechanism. Currently, the latest news item is the release of P5 last year; we should either bring news more often or not use the mechanism at all. LR/DO: raise this with board and/or put on agenda for next f2f meeting.

The upcoming release will be P5 1.2.0, as there are changes in the ODD source, not just in the text. Oxford team: prepare overview of changes for LR to announce on TEI-L

Placement of schematron constraints in ODD

SR prepared a note that argues, reluctantly, for adding a new element, constraint, even though the existing content element also contains constraints. The existing element might be thought of as a specialisation of the new element. Another option would be to use a type attribute on content.

The Council agrees that adding a constraint element seems the best solution, even though there may be limited issues of backwards compatibility. SR will prepare a draft proposal, including examples (possibly drawn from the many places in the where we say: do this in such and such a way, even though it cannot, as yet, be enforced).

Getting Started document

A number of council members (LR, AC, JC, DS, PB) are working on a section of the document. There should be a draft text at the members meeting, but it will not be not sufficiently vetted to create much furore about it. There is still room for people who want to join in. See . EP will contribute material about selecting an XML editor, that others may want to enhance.

Subjects for next meetings

• Can we offer a validation or other processing service for TEI documents?
• Stable references to TEI objects
• Create something like a TEI badge that sites that are built on TEI can display

Practicalities for members meeting

It is important to register, as the wireless access will use individual passwords created for registrees only.

Council membership will be indicated on the meeting badge, so people will know whom to address with their questions, complaints and ideas.

Maybe we should have a Council working lunch.

AC: SIG’s or other groups that need meeting room, please come forward.