Received: by UICVM (Mailer R2.07) id 8621; Tue, 29 May 90 08:09:00 CDT Date: Tue, 29 May 90 10:43:03 GMT Reply-To: Text Encoding Initiative Steering Committee List , SUSAN@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Sender: Text Encoding Initiative Steering Committee List From: SUSAN@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK Subject: Final version of minutes 19-20 May 1990 To: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE Minutes of the Steering Committee Meeting held on 19-20 May 1990 in Chicago. Present: D Walker (Chair), R Amsler, S Hockey, N Ide, M Sperberg-McQueen, A Zampolli, L Burnard 1. Secretary SH agreed to take the minutes so that LB and MS-McQ could concentrate on the report. 2. Agenda The agenda was listed as 1. Progress on report 2. Follow-on to report 3. Budget and EEC matters 4. Workplan for Phase 2 5. Possible conference at Bellagio 6. Survey 3. Current financial situation NEH had funded the application for phase 2 in its entirety, giving $318,974 as outright funds and $100,000 as matching funds. AZ had the contract with the EEC for 90,000 ECUS for one year from 1 June 1990 with the expectation of a further 90,000 ECUs for the second year. $18,000 of the Mellon money had been used to pay expenses which were to be covered by EEC/NEH money. The actual amount spent from the Mellon money was about $5,000. It was believed that there was some money left in the current NEH grant. DW/NI would confirm this and request that the grant be extended in order to use it all up. 4. Progress on Report The current state is: Chapter 1: 'there' Chapter 2: 'there' Chapter 3: 3.1 all present, believed to need some stylistic editing. 3.2 has been completely rewritten. 3.3 is extended cross references and is done. Chapter 4: substantially OK. S DeRose is reorganising it. Chapter 5: A draft is available which has gaps in it. The editors recommend deleting the missing parts. Chapter 6: Basically complete. The editors want to change some parts Chapter 7: Literary texts has been redone. Office documents and corpora need further discussion. The editors had received nothing from the dictionary group and so had drafted that section themselves. Chapter 8: Introductory material is there. The phonology section is not expected as B Poser has been ill. The section on morphology does not include word category classification which is a big gap. MSMcQ had something based on LOB/Brown which might fill this. Chapter 9: Well-written and clear, but it was written before the rest of the material was ready and needs to know what the rest of the text says. No cookbook recipes are available. Chapter 10: (list of tags) exists in part. S DeRose is working on it. Appendix A: (history of how the guidelines were created) does not exist but is easy to create from existing documents. Appendix B: (sample translations) needs the groundwork first. We have only mechanisms into and out of SGML. No text available yet. Appendix C: (DTDs) does not exist, but some fragments are available. Appendix D: (Examples) Only one so far available. Appendix E (Code pages) S DeRose is working on this, including how to print them. It was decided that there would be an executive summary of 10-15 pages which the editors would write. It was decided that the report needed a preface of about 3 pages, describing the 'who, what, how and when' of the project. NI would draft this and circulate it so that the final version would be ready by 24 May. A list of committee members and supporting organisations would also be provided. 5. Timetable for completion of the report 24 May 1990: text of draft 0 locked 1 June 1990: distribute draft 0 to committees and Advisory Board 7 June 1990: workshops in Siegen and Pittsburgh 1 July 1990: comments from initial distribution due 15 July 1990: public release of draft 1 6. General comments on the report (These minutes only record significant changes to the text or information of general relevance. Detailed notes were taken by the editors.) 6.1 Stylistic usage of verbs such as 'must', 'may' etc (a) 'required': is expressed with 'must'. Conformance is also expressed by the use of an unqualified imperative. It needs to be globally understood that the use of the imperative means 'mark this feature if it is there'. Conformance can be by-passed by modifying the DTD. The document then becomes conformant to the new DTD. (b) 'recommended'; is expressed by 'prefer' or 'should'. Features which are recommended may be ignored by conforming texts. (c) Other points are expressed by neutral declarative sentences. 6.2 Footnotes Footnotes would not be used for vital information, only for asides. 6.3 Attributes and their values There will be three global attributes: ID, LANG and N (meaning name or number). ID is local to the document. At one end of the extreme, attributes will only have the values Y or N. At the other any value is possible. 6.4 Extent of editors' modifications Any substantial changes made by the editors will be checked with the originator of that section. 7. Comments on specific sections (The old chapter numbers are used here) It was agreed to remove Chapter 1. Parts of it would appear in chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, there would be a separate subsection on conformance. The title of Chapter 3 would become 'Markup and SGML'. The character sets (referred to in Chapter 4) would be an appendix. If TLG beta-code is documented specifically, the text must be worded so that it does not appear that we recommend this particularly. We should not commit ourselves now to any registration procedures for character sets. Chapter 5 needs to be modified so that there are fewer references to things understood only by librarians. In Chapter 6, the section on S-units was controversial as well as being in a prominent position. It was politically difficult to do much about this other than explain why it is there. The section(s) on items marked by quotes had been revised, as had that on names. The sections done by R Cencioni on figures, tables and diagrams were also too long. For political reasons care must be taken in revising them. A review of the section on referencing systems led to a discussion on CONCUR, which is not fully understood. The editors felt they did not have enough time to test the software using CONCUR thoroughly. The alternative is to have a flat set of empty tags (not unlike COCOA), which are called milestones. This shifts the specification of the hierarchy into the applications software. It was agreed to deal with both approaches and only to recommend CONCUR if it can be shown to work for what we want to do. Section 6.11 (critical editions) would contain only the first part on the critical apparatus with a note to say that work is in progress. It was agreed to reverse Chapters 7 and 8. Section 7.4 on corpora could have some political problems. It needs a heading something like 'Special issues for language corpora' and a note to indicate the scope of the section. AZ felt that Chapter 8 had too much on expressing the linguistic features in SGML and not enough about the features themselves. 8. Distribution of the report AZ noted that this report will not be easy for the average user but that expectations were high. The preface must say something about the policy on this point, stressing that this is only the end of phase 1. The editors would draft a reader feedback form with space for both the usability of the report in this form and comments on the technical content. There would be a running head on every page, something like 'Version 1: First Public Draft'. UIC would send out all copies of Version 0 to the Advisory Board, Affiliated Projects, and all committee members by 1 June. DW would write the covering letter. Version 1 would be distributed on demand to the public by UIC for North America and by OUCS for Europe. There would be no charge for the first copy sent to each address. Subsequent copies to the same address would be $50 each. It would be distributed only on paper form. The editors would experiment to find the most economical format. SH would investigate printing and distribution costs at OUCS and DW would then write a letter to OUCS confirming that these costs would be reimbursed by the TEI. The editors would draft a publicity release for Version 1. 9. Timetable for Phase 2 In the proposal this is 1st comment period to March 1991 Response by TEI June - July 1991 2nd (final) comment period to December 1991 Response by TEI March 1992 10. Bellagio Conference NI drew attention to the Rockefeller Foundation's conference centre at Bellagio on Lake Como. Rockefeller will fund meetings of up to 25 participants (at least half of whom are non-US) at the centre and the TEI fits into one of their categories. Rockefeller support includes only the place, not travel. A proposal for a meeting next summer is required by 30 June 1990. It was agreed to pursue this. NI would call them to find out (a) if they choose the exact date (b) to whom the grant can be made - individuals or institutions and then NI and SH would draft the proposal. The meeting would focus on promoting the TEI among archive and corpus people. The Steering Committee, Editors and Committee Chairs could attend using TEI funds for travel. Travel expenses for the other attendees could be paid out of the Mellon money. 11. EEC Contract AZ noted that the deadlines in the current EEC contract are overdue. Draft 0 should have been circulated at the end of March so that the EEC could have draft 1 at the end of May. He will ask them to accept the delay. If they do not they will be sent draft 0 saying that it has been seen by part of the Advisory Board. AZ also had to submit overall expenses for the European part of the project to total 66,000 ECUs European editor 75,000 ECUs European Committee Head 141,000 ECUs Steering Committee and Working Committee participation 66,000 ECUs for LB covers 15 months, plus computer services, travel, etc. A breakdown of costs for S Johansson is also needed. D Wujastyk's contribution will also be included in the 75,000 ECUs. The contract for 1990-1991 has the same figures. It also names the European Working Committee members and so only new sub-committees will be possible for phase 2. 12. Next meeting The next meeting of the Steering Committee will be in Oxford on 6-7 July. The principal agenda item will be the organisation and budget for phase 2.