Notes on Steering Committee Meeting with Syun Tutiya, 16 May 1993 C. M. Sperberg-McQueen TEI SC M30 24 May 1993 Draft May 24, 1993 (14:40:21) The meeting convened at 5:40 p.m. Sunday 16 May 1993. Those present were Susan Armstrong-Warwick (SA), Lou Burnard (LB), Susan Hockey (SH), Nancy Ide (NI), C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (MSM), Syun Tutiya (ST), Donald Walker (DW), and Antonio Zampolli (AZ). ST said that he had asked for the meeting in order to report on the current state of activities in Japan and to ask the opinions and advice of the committee. 1 FUND RAISING ST has been working for funds, and has raised 3,000,000 yen, in his own name and that of the editors. Applications are going to several government agencies with reference to the TEI, some of which he knows about and some of which he is not familiar with. There will be a new project for a speech corpus, mainly for speech-processing researchers, in which ST will be involved. He is not sure of its size, but it will not be small. There is an informal agreement that some portion of it will be for TEI activity. Several conferences on corpora will be held between now and CoLing. People in Japan are becoming more interested in data collection and hence in TEI. 2 ORGANIZING LONG-TERM HOME FOR TEI WORK Fundraising is difficult, however, because of the economic situation. The Japanese have approached JSIP (the Japanese Society for Information Processing), but because companies are not very free-handed now, no approaches have been made to commercial organizations to secure the external funding required for JSIP support. This has had the effect of temporarily stopping the project. There are interested parties in the National Institute for Japanese Literature (Yasunaga), and National Museum for History and Ethology (Prof. Terui). Terui is personally interested in the TEI but cannot be directly involved himself. Yasunaga plans to convert his grammar to a TEI-conformant one. The institute did a large collection of Japanese literature, (from Genji onward), but failed to have good relations with publishers and has had to recall the CD-ROM. The interest of such national institutes is very heartening. They might be capable of organ- izing an institutional basis for the TEI. 3 LIAISON WITH ISO, JIS, ETC. Liaison with ISO/JIS progresses. A professor of engineering at ST's university has been appointed to diredct a project on SGML, ODA, etc. This is a useful, though purely personal, contact. The SPREAD project is an attempt to join SGML with the CJK unification of ISO 10646. ISO 10646 is hard to use because there is a a large base of data and installed infrastructure (hardware, software, and expertise) which uses the JIS 0208 standard based on ISO 2022; the marriage of ISO 10646 with JIS 0208 is not easy. Taiwan's delegates to the SPREAD project are showing interest in the TEI. An SGML User's Group is being formed and had an auspicious meeting last month. ST has been asked by Japan's representative to JIS for his comments on ISO 10646. (Japan voted no on ISO 10646.) In general, ST feels people are not terribly responsive to TEI just yet. ST has set up a mailing list for people in Japan interested in TEI, mainly for distribution of drafts. A subscription of ca. 60, most- ly computer scientists and engineers. Since few humanists have email, contact with humanists is difficult. 4 FUTURE PLANS 4.1 Long-Term Plans Future plans hinge largely on Yokoi, the leader of EDR (Electronic Dictionary Research lab) -- EDR is closing in two years. The major semi-governmental funding agency is looking for the successor to EDR; Yokoi thinks a corpus consortium is a good idea, the budget for which would run to 4-5 billion yen ($40-50 million). This is essentially the same size as the EDR (in yen; the dollar amount of EDR may be more like $60 million). SA was encouraged by this and felt that corporate inter- est in such a corpus project would be high. ST warned however that in the past months companies have become very cautious about spending any money. A second project would involve a huge knowledge base, bigger than EDR. Japanese researchers in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence have less and less money now. But if either of these projects (corpus or knowledge base) is successful, we may have some secure funding for the next five to seven years. At the earliest, such funding would begin in April 1994 with the new fiscal year. A second item in the long-term plan is cooperation with researchers in Japanese, Occidental, and Chinese literature and linguistics, and history. These people are very hard to reach. ST tried to organize a kind of symposium for literary people and computer scientists, but the literary scholars rapidly split among themselves and the project is stuck. The third item of the long-term plan is to approach librarians. The fourth is to link the TEI to ongoing cooperation among Asian countries. The Pacific computational linguistics conference, for example, has one session on corpus work. 4.2 Short-Term Issues * physical copies of P3 in Japan * tutorials and workshops * translation and introduction Yokoi promised that EDR would print and distribute P3, but that esti- mate was based on the notion that P3 would be about the same size as TEI P1, and they may be unable to do it. The upshot is simply that the North Americans should print and bind extra copies for Japan. ST will handle distribution in Japan. Tutorials and workshops are needed: tutorials first of all. There are quite a few people in computational linguistics interested in TEI. A workshop would be a very good idea. Since there is a small amount of money, it is easy for at least LB and MSM to come to Japan. 1-2 and 3-4 December is one possibility, in connection with the knowledge base con- ference. The next year in Kyoto at CoLing would be another possibility. (The problem is that the literary people often have weak English. Interpreters are possible, but expensive, and the technical terminology poses problems.) The sponsoring organizations are asked to cooperate. Translations and introduction are straightforward; when P3 is fin- ished, ST will see about having a translation made. The Japanese commitment to the future of the TEI will, for the coming few years, be individual-based and project-based. No overall TEI Japan center is possible. If either or both of Yokoi's projects comes about, then he promises to fund some long-term work at a center for Asian par- ticipation in the TEI. One final good piece of news: ST can offer a TEI archive site. The university will have a 20 Gb ftp server, and ST will have the disposal of one to ten percent: one Gb willl be available. (ST will give LB and MSM accounts on the machine, in order to simplify maintenance.) It was agreed that EDR, which has paid for ST's attendance at the three technical review meetings, will be acknowledged in the front mat- ter of P3. The meeting adjourned at 6:20 p.m. Draft May 24, 1993 (14:40:21)