From U49127@UICVM.UIC.EDU Tue Sep 1 10:42:30 1998 Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:54:00 CDT From: "Wendy Plotkin, TEI (312) 413-0331" To: The Laptop at Burnard Towers Subject: ED P2 Doc Charges to the Working Committees Document Number: TEI EDP2 Version 3, August 28, 1989 ABSTRACT This document describes the responsibilities of the working committees of the Text Encoding Initative and suggests mechanisms for their work. It is intended primarily to provide general guidance for the committee heads and the members of the working committees. Detailed organization of the drafting process is left to the best judgement of the committees themselves. This document sketches briefly the responsibilities of the four working committees and their interactions. The Committee on Text Documentation will focus on documentation of text, encoding, and encoding practice. The Committee on Text Representation will address the problems of repre- senting electronically the structural and other features of a text for which a conventional physical representation already exists, for example italics to indicate emphasis or quotation, boldface to indicate head- ings, etc. The Committee on Text Analysis and Interpretation will devise methods of representing additional information for which no con- ventional typographic or physical representation exists, for example syntactic categories or interpretive annotation. And the Committee on Metalanguage and Syntax Issues will specify the syntax of the Text Encoding Initiative encoding scheme, formulate a metalanguage for the specification of encoding schemes, and produce descriptions in that metalanguage of the TEI scheme and other encoding schemes. The central task of the working committees is to produce drafts of sec- tions of the guidelines to be produced by the Initiative. In connection with their work they will also produce sets of worked examples, working papers and commentary, and minutes of their meetings. The committees will meet four times between February, 1989, and June, 1990, when the first public draft of the guidelines is scheduled to be ready. Travel of voting members of the working committees will be subsidized, but ser- vice on subcommittees is completely voluntary and unremunerated. Preliminary analyses of the committees' problem areas are due by Octo- ber, 1989, and draft guidelines are due by February, 1990. 1. INTRODUCTION The working committees of the Text Encoding Initiative bear the respon- sibility for the central work of the project. The success of the Initi- ative therefore depends upon them. It is in their deliberations and analyses that the guidelines will be essentially made; it is in their work that the project will take on its characteristic shape. The work of the Steering Committee and editors, the funding contributed by gov- ernmental and private sources, and the voluminous preparatory documents will not, by themselves, make the text encoding guidelines; their sole purpose is to assist the work of the volunteers who will make up the working committees. The basic task of the committees is straightforward: they must examine the technical issues of encoding practice that fall within their indi- vidual areas, and discover or if necessary create a consensus among skilled practitioners. They must then recommend specific practices for text encoding and interchange which reflect that consensus. The rest of this document sketches some important facets of this basic task: * the division of responsibility among the committees (sec. 2) * the results and documents expected of the committees (sec. 3) * recommended procedures and organizational arrangements (sec. 4) * the resources available to the committees (sec. 5) * schedule (sec. 6) The overall organization of the Text Encoding Initiative is described elsewhere (see documents TEI J 3, SC G 3, and especially SC G 5, which provides a full project description). The design principles and basic syntax for the guidelines are described in documents PC P 1 (the closing statement of the Poughkeepsie Planning Conference), ED P 1 (Design Prin- ciples), and ML P 1 (Basic Syntax). The encoding scheme formulated by the Text Encoding Initiative will be a tag set conforming to the Stan- dard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) defined by international stan- dard ISO 8879, unless the needs of textual research make it impossible to conform strictly to SGML. 2. DIVISION OF RESPONSIBILITIES 2.1. Text Documentation This committee will address problems of labeling a text encoding so that its source text and other identifying characteristics are well document- ed. The needs of library cataloguing, archive documentation, end users, and processing programs will all be considered, and relevant standards will be attended to. The committee may also consider the internal docu- mentation of the encoding (in the form of declarations, etc.) needed for machine processing, but the major responsibility for the content of dec- larations will be borne by the Committees on Text Representation and Analysis and, for the syntax of the declarations, by the Committee on Metalanguage and Syntax Issues. 2.2. Text Representation This committee will address the problems of representing in machine- readable form 1. the physical aspects of a copy source 2. all information explicitly present in the copy text on the physi- cal or graphetic level, including non-Latin writing schemes 3. all the textual features (e.g. emphasis, words in other languages, basic text structure) conventionally represented by the typography of a printed edition, whether the copy text represents them explicitly by using such conventions or not Topics included in the field of this committee thus include the explicit tagging or representation of: * quotations * mathematical formulas * figures, tables, and illustrations and their captions * hyphenations (including declaration of how hyphenation in the source has been treated in the encoding) * punctuation * diacritics and "special" character sets * change of language or alphabets * the conventional use, in a given encoding, of characters as alpha- betics, punctuation, diacritics, or separators * topography or layout of the text * recto and verso, type of paper, color of page, watermarks, etc. * logical structure of a text (chapters, paragraphs, etc.) * conventional reference numbers for a text * lineation (on page, in column, in logical subdivision, etc.) * editorial additions, deletions, or corrections * editorial apparatus (apparatus criticus) * special problems of numismatic, epigraphic, or paleographic material * special problems posed by the physical realization of a genre (e.g. comic strips). It should be noted that the distinction between this committee and the next is not that between objective and subjective or interpretive infor- mation, since the typographic level of the text addressed by this com- mittee can indicate specific editorial interpretations of the text by means of font, layout, or special punctuation. In addition, the special problems of spoken texts and of dictionaries, unlike those of other spe- cific genres, will for pragmatic reasons not be taken up here but in the Committee on Text Analysis and Interpretation. During the first two-year drafting cycle, this committee will focus on the logical description of the text, reserving detailed physical description for later development. The tag set completed during the first two years should be adequate to the needs of unillustrated liter- ary texts (poetry, plays, novels and short stories) in both critical and popular editions; at least the simpler types of apparatus will be han- dled in the first drafting cycle. Codes will be provided only for alphabetic languages. In later drafting cycles, the basic tag set created in the first cycle will be extended to handle problems presented by * less common text types * more general cases of reference works * more complex tabular and mathematical material, if needed * more complex types of apparatus and commentary (building on experi- ence with the basic tag set for apparatus developed in the first cycle) * multidirectional text (e.g. mixed Hebrew-and-Greek), with provision for declaring the specific encoding method used * text in less common foreign languages (an attempt will be made to provide guidance for the encoding of every major language in which computer-assisted work is known to be underway in Europe or North America) * codicological and typographical research requiring a detailed physi- cal description of the text carrier 2.3. Text Analysis and Interpretation This committee will address problems of representing, in machine- readable form, the results of interpretive and analytic work by schol- ars. A full list of the possible areas of application that fall under this heading will be developed in the early stages of this project; a short list of examples includes * phonology * morphology * syntax * stylistics * metrics * full-text retrieval systems * thematic study * semantics * content analysis * lexicography For pragmatic reasons, problems peculiar to some specific text types will also be handled here, wherever texts of that type are typically encoded primarily by scholars interested in a specific type of analysis. Most notably, transcripts of oral speech, dictionaries, and glossaries, which are of paramount interest to computational linguists and lexicog- raphers, will be treated by this committee rather than the Committee on Text Representation. It is expected that this committee will work closely with the existing Dictionary Encoding Initiative, which is cre- ating an SGML-based markup scheme for machine-readable dictionaries under the guidance of Robert Amsler and Frank Tompa, and that it will benefit from their experience and results. Establishing the boundary between representation and interpretation of texts will require careful coordination between this committee and the preceding one on issues of content. The presentation of statistical summaries and certain kinds of textual-critical analysis are two of the more obvious borderline cases that must receive special attention. During the first two years of drafting, this committee will focus prima- rily on the incorporation of linguistic descriptions into machine- readable texts. The order of progression will be pragmatic, beginning with the most common features of existing text-tagging schemes and the information most commonly encoded in the analysis and tagging of exist- ing corpora. It is expected that the committee will begin with tagging on the lexical level (token-by-token): thus lemmatization, morphologi- cal information, and word-class information would first occupy the com- mittee's attention. Following the development of adequate schemes for tagging at the lexical level, the committee will progress to the identi- fication and tagging of phrases, syntagmata, and idioms, with the aim of producing a tag set adequate to the representation of the syntactic structure of the text in terms of the major linguistic approaches. Final decisions as to the feasibility of specific tag sets and the order in which to attack them must of course be left to the expert judgment of the committee itself. Tag sets for these levels (lexical and phrase-structural) would provide a solid basis for a wide variety of applications, including sophisticat- ed documentation for dictionary development and lexicography, statisti- cal studies of text, stylistic studies, natural-language software inter- faces, spelling and style checkers for teaching or industry, second-language acquisition, composition software, and so on. In gener- al, any application for which large amounts of textual data are impor- tant could benefit from the use of corpora tagged with such tag sets. Issues of semantics, pragmatics, discourse structure, metrics, thematic analysis, and purely literary study will be more readily soluble after lexical and phrase-structure tag sets are prepared. It is not foreseen that tag sets for these fields will be completed within the first two years; some, indeed, may prove wholly intractable. The committee may begin analysis and study of these fields in the first two years, as it deems appropriate. During the first drafting cycle, the committee will also begin looking at the increasingly urgent problems of transcribing corpora of spoken language in machine-readable form. No final results are expected on this topic, however, until a later phase of the project. 2.4. Metalanguage and Syntax This committee is charged with several tasks: * They will examine existing encoding schemes, and in particular SGML and the American Association of Publisher's standard for electronic manuscript markup, to verify that the syntax of the markup scheme recommended by the guidelines can be compatible with these schemes, or can be an extension of these schemes. Compatibility with the existing international standard is a major desideratum of this project; clearly, there is no need for our project to duplicate the work already done on SGML, the design of which has been carefully developed over the past several years. * They will develop a formal metalanguage for the description of encoding schemes, and formulate in it adequate descriptions of the major existing schemes. A necessary prior task will be to determine the major existing schemes, assemble descriptions of these schemes, and consider their relations to one another and to the scheme that the Text Encoding Initiative aims to develop. The purposes of the metalanguage description of these schemes are (1) to ensure that the encoding scheme proposed by the guidelines is compatible with exist- ing schemes, in the sense that anything expressed in an existing scheme is translatable into the new scheme; and (2) to provide, through the metalanguage, a formal mechanism to simplify the design of programs to translate from existing schemes to the new scheme. * Because this group will have special skills in formal language theo- ry, they will also be active in formulating specifics of syntax for the new encoding scheme (for example specifying the form to be taken by the declaration of new tags or multiple character sets) and ensuring its notational extensibility. In the first two-year cycle of drafting, this committee will be expected to produce a general description of SGML syntax for use with the guide- lines, any extensions needed by the other working committees, and a metalanguage intended to be adequate for the description of some finite set of five to ten markup schemes now used in the field. The selection of schemes to cover in this first phase will be up to the committee itself, but likely candidates include the tagging schemes developed by or for the COCOA concordance program (now used in OCP), the Treasury of the French Language, the Brown and Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpora of mod- ern English, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the corpora of the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa, Waterloo and IBM GML, TRoff, LaTeX, and Scribe. Fragments of formal descriptions of these schemes may be completed, but it is not expected that complete formal descrip- tions will be finished for any scheme within the two years. In later work, formal descriptions of these major existing encoding schemes will be made, the metalanguage will be revised as needed, algor- ithms for constructing translation programs will be devised (implementa- tion will presumably be deferred for a separate project), and descrip- tions of other schemes will be made as far as possible. 2.5. Coordination, Boundary Questions 2.5.1. Text Representation and Text Analysis: The most obvious bound- ary problem in the committee charges arises from the difficulty of dis- tinguishing reliably between text representation and text analysis. As noted above, we cannot and do not rely on a differentiation of subjec- tive and objective information, but on the simpler test: "Is there a typographic convention for the representation of this textual feature?" in assigning a topic to one committee or the other. This question is usually easy to answer, since current typographic conventions are amply documented in published manuals of style. In cases of dispute, the edi- tors will decide and formally assign the disputed topic to a committee. It should be noted that the test asks whether a typographic convention exists, not whether it is used in a given text. Since the typography of critical apparatus, for example, is well established, the Committee on Text Representation will deal with critical apparatus and therefore with other areas of textual variation, even though many editions provide no apparatus. 2.5.2. Declarations and Documentation of Practice: The Text Documenta- tion Committee, having general responsibility for the in-file documenta- tion of the encoding, must allow space for the computational declara- tions necessary for proper machine processing of the file; conversely, the other committees, in designing the syntax and specifics of such dec- larations, must ensure that they can go into the documentation and dec- laration section of the file without problems. 2.5.3. Surveys of Existing Encoding Schemes: The final responsibility for the formal description of existing markup schemes lies with the Metalanguage Committee, but the other committees will be required by the nature of their task to undertake some survey of the semantics of exist- ing encoding schemes, as preliminary studies to their own lists of tex- tual features and tags. The results of their surveys will be useful to the Metalanguage Committee, and their subject expertise will be useful in ensuring the accuracy of the formal and informal semantic specifica- tion of existing schemes. 2.5.4. Syntactic Questions, Clarifications, and Extensions: Where working committees find themselves uncertain about issues of syntax, including the proper interpretation of the rules of SGML or of the basic syntax of the guidelines, they should appeal to the Committee on Meta- language and Syntax. For purposes of the Text Encoding Initiative, this committee shall settle all questions of SGML interpretation. Similarly, if a working committee believes that the syntax of SGML makes impossible some necessary tagging convention, they may request the Meta- language and Syntax Committee to develop or approve an extension to the syntax. The syntax committee may approve a proposed syntactic exten- sion, develop a different extension that meets the case, or suggest a method for obtaining the desired results from within the SGML framework without extension. The Metalanguage and Syntax Committee bears final responsibility for the syntactic rules of the guidelines, but is obli- gated to ensure that those rules are adequate to the needs of scholarly research. The individual working committees are responsible for deter- mining the adequacy of the syntax to the requirements of their area. In case of dispute, the editors will decide. In order to make texts encoded in accordance with the guidelines acces- sible to the broad variety of SGML products being developed, the Meta- language and Syntax Committee is to make every effort to ensure that extensions to the syntax of SGML can be masked from conformant SGML pro- grams by simple filters, appropriate document type or SGML declarations, or placement in comments or other marked sections which can be ignored by conforming programs. 3. RESULTS AND DOCUMENTS EXPECTED OF THE WORKING COMMITTEES 3.1. Drafts The most visible final product of the Text Encoding Initiative will be a document formulating guidelines for the encoding and interchange of tex- tual data, with special attention to the needs of research scholars. The final form of this document will be prepared by the editors of the project, subject to the revisions of the Steering Committee and advisory board. The committees are responsible for providing concrete recommen- dations for encoding practices, in a form useful to the editors. The most useful form that the committees can provide will be a formal draft of the relevant section of the guidelines, but in some cases, the committees may make specific recommendations for the content of the guidelines but leave final formulation to the editors. The exact form of the guidelines will evolve from the interactions of the working com- mittees and the editors. At the least, the committee drafts should: 1. analyze a problem area (at least implicitly) 2. provide a list of the textual features of most common interest to scholars working in the area 3. provide, for the listed textual features, a set of SGML tags for marking the features; such a tag set should specify a. a set of "generic identifiers" b. their associated attributes c. the range of possible values for each attribute d. structural relations holding among the features (e.g. hier- archy, mutual exclusion) 4. recommend, if appropriate, that some of those features and tags be included in all general-purpose encodings, or in all encodings intended for research in a given field 5. organize the set of features and tags, as appropriate, into cohe- rent groups of tag/feature sets suitable for use together; the groups may be delimited by their level of detail, by the specific research interests they serve, by theoretical position, or other- wise, and can be arranged hierarchically or in parallel No list of features can be exhaustive; the committees should strive for a thorough, explicit list of the features of most general interest to scholars working in the field. Overall coverage of an area should be kept in mind, but our first task is to make the guidelines useful for the kind of work now being done; features, however important intrinsi- cally, which no one now encodes or is likely to encode soon, are less crucial for the guidelines than the features being encoded now or in the near future. The feature lists must also specify what the features mean. It may prove difficult to specify such meaning formally, and the methods for doing so may vary from field to field, but features must at least be described informally with enough detail that practitioners in the field can work without confusion from the descriptions. Both meaning and selection of features depend inevitably upon the committee's theoretical orientation; in fields with several incompatible competing theories, the committees must somehow resolve the field's theoretical diversity (see document ED P1 "Design Principles"). 3.2. Worked Examples To clarify the recommendations, and to test their utility, the commit- tees should provide worked examples showing the markup of real texts or text fragments with the recommended tags. These examples will not all appear in the guidelines, but a selection of examples and interpreta- tions will be made and published separately. Only extensive use of tag sets can show their usefulness or shortcomings; committees should make and preserve as many examples of tag use as possible. The text-encoding projects affiliated with the Initiative will apply the draft guidelines to entire texts; committees should focus on fragments from a very wide variety of texts. 3.3. Working Papers and Commentary The guidelines themselves will have little place for discursive justifi- cations of the analyses which lead the committees to their recommenda- tions. The analyses themselves, however, which may often involve rather difficult substantive research in the underlying theory of a field, should be published wherever appropriate. The preliminary analysis of a field leading to a list of textual fea- tures and a tag set, or the consideration of possible solutions to some technical problem in markup, will require significant effort by individ- ual committee members. The working papers they produce, even though intended in the first analysis for the use of the committees, will often interest a wider audience. The editors of various journals have already expressed an interest in publishing such working papers, where appropri- ate, after the usual review; documents not published in journals will be issued, from time to time, as the Working Papers of the Text Encoding Initiative. Whether published or not, this material (like all the work- ing papers and drafts of the committees) should be transmitted to the editors and may be used in the collection of examples and interpreta- tions mentioned above. 3.4. Minutes and Other Records of Meetings Working committees are expected to keep minutes of their meetings for future reference, for the use of those absent from the meeting, for the information of those new to the committee, and so on. Minutes should be filed with the editors and will typically be distributed to all commit- tee heads and members of the Steering Committee. Attachments to the minutes should contain examples worked on in session and similar supple- mentary material. Subcommittees are similarly encouraged to keep full minutes of their work and file them with the editors. 4. RECOMMENDED PROCEDURES 4.1. Membership The voting members of the working committees are named by the Steering Committee, on the nomination of participating organizations and the Steering Committee. Committee sizes are not fixed, but the budget has been prepared expecting ten members (six North Americans and four Euro- peans) on each committee. If fewer members are nominated by the partic- ipating organizations, the committee heads may wish to suggest names as well. Participation in the discussion and meetings of the committees need not be restricted to voting members of the committees, though travel subsid- ies are available only for voting members. Non-voting members may also participate in the work of subcommittees (see below). Definite lists of voting members will be prepared in case committees prove unable to reach unanimity on important issues and must resort to formal divisions. Such votes are useful tools, but committees should strive for consensus, especially on important issues. The editor and the associate editor are ex officio voting members of each committee. 4.2. Meetings The four committees are expected to meet four times each during the first drafting-and-revision phase of the project, with the exception of the committee on text documentation, which will meet only twice owing to its more narrowly circumscribed duties. These meetings can be scheduled at the committees' convenience. For financial reasons, meetings just before or just after major conferences in the field are recommended, so that members will find it easier to get travel support from their institutions. Organizational details are left to the committees, but experience shows that a written agenda, written minutes, copies for each participant of examples to be discussed, access to photocopy machines, a blackboard, and even a microcomputer or a terminal in the work room are all useful. 4.3. Subcommittees Subcommittees may be formed by the committee heads at their own discre- tion. They should be open to all volunteers both from within the com- mittee and from the text computing community at large. (Or at least to any interested member of a participating or sponsoring organization.) Membership in subcommittees need not overlap at all with the membership of the parent committee, although in most cases there should be at least two committee members on a subcommittee. (Subcommittees formed to con- sider character sets and transliterations for specific language fami- lies, such as Semitic or Slavic, constitute the major exception to this rule.) Subcommittee work is entirely voluntary, and entirely unreimbursed. Documents prepared by subcommittees, on the other hand, are eligible for publication in the Working Papers, and minutes of subcommittee meetings should be filed with the editors. 4.4. Analysis of Problem Area The committee heads will begin the committee work by drafting an analy- sis of the problem area, to serve as a starting point for discussion and further work. This paper should survey the field to be covered and answer the questions: * How is the field delimited? * What subfields does it contain and how are they delimited? * How do the subfields relate to each other and to areas covered by other committees? * How simple or complex does each subfield appear to be, with regard to its underlying theory, with regard to the data it handles, and with regard to the technical problems it poses for a markup scheme? * What subfields should be worked on first by the committee, which should be left for later? * What subcommittees should be formed to handle these problems? 4.5. Surveys of Existing Schemes One of the first tasks in most committees will be to take a census of the textual features in the committee's area of competence which are included in existing encoding schemes. Since it is easiest to record the syntax and the semantic primitives (the tags, commands, or other basic markup units) of existing schemes one scheme at a time, it is rec- ommended that all committees cooperate in producing overviews of the syntax and semantics of existing schemes. Such an overview should con- tain a list of all the semantic primitives ("commands," "tags," "format- ting environments" or whatever they may be called) with the following information for each: * name of the primitive * the textual feature, attribute, component, structure or thing it represents * parallels to other encoding schemes, if known to the compiler (e.g. "performs same function as TeX \para") * parameters or arguments taken by the primitive, if any (their name, the features they represent, the values they can take, etc.) * relations to other semantic primitives (especially structural rela- tions, e.g. "typically occurs only within quoted material" or "typi- cally contains one or more chapters") ________ together with whatever other annotations seem useful. A second list of primitives, arranged into related groups, is also desirable. (E.g. "Conditionals and Logic," "File-Level Operations," "Floating Text Blocks," "Font Processing," "Footnotes," "Formatting Environment," ... "Margins," etc.) Such grouped lists will provide a particularly necessary tool for the committees in seeking examples of textual primitives relevant to their work. 4.6. Working Papers Individual subcommittees or individual members of working committees will draft working papers on areas of specific concern, each working paper analyzing the textual features relevant to the area and proposing a set of SGML tags for encoding them. A great deal of earlier work must be reviewed and synthesized by a general theoretical analysis in order for such working papers to be successful. If of general interest, these working papers should be published either in a journal or in the Working Papers of the Text Encoding Initiative. 4.7. Electronic Conferencing While face-to-face meetings are essential in committee work, and normal mail is useful, most of the work of the committees will probably be done over electronic networks. Access to Bitnet, Janet, EARN, or the Inter- net is very important for all committee members, and essential for com- mittee heads. (Access to electronic networks will not be made a requirement for membership on any TEI committee, however. Committees must make some efforts to accommodate members without network access.) It is expected that a public discussion or mailing list using Listserv software will be set up at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and committees may wish to request private mailing lists for their discus- sions. Contact the editor for information. 4.8. Internal Circulation of Drafts All committee papers should be distributed to the two editors as well as the voting members of the committees; as soon as a committee has accept- ed a draft document as the basis for further work and refinement, that draft should be circulated to the heads of the other committees, the editors, and where appropriate also to affiliated projects and other interested parties. This internal circulation will be taken care of by the editorial center in Chicago. 4.9. Public Circulation of Drafts When each committee has achieved consensus on at least the major and simpler issues of its charge, their drafts will be combined by the edi- tors into a single draft of the guidelines and made available for public comment. Partial drafts should not be circulated publicly. 5. BUDGET AND OTHER RESOURCES 5.1. Committee Heads If necessary, the budget provides funds to pay one and a half years of quarter-time salary to the heads of the Representation, Analysis, and Metalanguage Committees. No funds are available for the Documentation Committee head. Clerical support for the committee heads must be pro- vided by their host institutions. 5.2. Travel Money The budget also provides for travel subsidies for the working commit- tees. The travel budget is based on these estimates: * the Text Documentation Committee meets twice in the first drafting cycle; the other committees meet four times. * six members of each committee are North Americans; four are Europe- ans. * sixty percent of the committee meetings are held in North America, forty percent in Europe. * meetings last two full days; members from the same continent are in "travel status" for three days (and thus receive three per diem allowances), members from the other continent are in travel status for five days. * average trans-Atlantic airfare is estimated at $1000, average air- fare within the U.S. at $500 and within Europe at $400. * per diem expenditures (hotel and meals) are $100/day. * at each meeting, nine members attend (one from the other continent is missing). It is not expected that we will be able to reimburse voting committee members for more than half (50%) of their travel costs. 5.3. Support by Editorial Staff The editorial staff will take care of document distribution and archiv- ing, as well as providing at least some rudimentary service as a secre- tariat for the committees. Resources are limited. 6. SCHEDULE For the guidelines to succeed, they must reflect the consensus of the text-computing community. To ensure that they do, we will seek public comment as early and as often as we can. We hope to circulate a first full draft of the guidelines by March of 1990; this may be incomplete in some respects, but it should clearly exhibit the basic structure of the guidelines and provide tags for the most common and easiest textual fea- tures. The process of preparing this first full public draft is referred to in this document and in the full project descriptions as the "first drafting cycle." It corresponds to the first funding cycle; lat- er drafting cycles, which will extend the coverage of the guidelines and revise the existing guidelines in light of experience and public com- ment, will be funded by separate grants. Expected deadlines: October - December, 1988: Syntax Committee (nucleus of later Metalan- guage Committee, possibly with additions) develops preliminary SGML- based syntax for encoding scheme. October, 1988: Steering Committee meets, appoints heads of Documenta- tion, Representation, and Analysis Committees, and makes first appointments of committee members. February, 1989: Advisory Board meets to approve detailed design goals and preliminary syntax and discuss committee organization. Target date for completion of first collection of documentation for existing schemes; copies of documentation obtained thus far distributed to com- mittee heads. February - March, 1989: Committee heads write initial analyses of their problem areas ("startup papers"), to serve as starting points for the work of their committees. March - October, 1989: Working committees and subcommittees meet to analyse their problem areas, document and discuss existing practice, and consider possible recommendations. June, 1989: Committee heads meet with Steering Committee to review progress; working committees meet for working sessions at ICCH, Toron- to. October, 1989: Target date for completion of committees' preliminary analysis of their problem areas. Committees report in writing to Steering Committee. Steering Committee meets to review progress. October, 1989 - February, 1990: Working committees meet to develop draft recommendations from their preliminary analyses. February, 1990: Committee heads meet with Steering Committee to review progress and resolve problems. First draft of each committee's recom- mendations expected for this time. February - March, 1990: Editors prepare combined first draft of guide- lines, it circulates to advisory board and other interested parties for examination and trials on texts.