TEI SC W3: TEI FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS Susan Hockey and Don Walker 10 July 1992 Our proposed plan for future development entails a transition period of twelve months from 1 January 1993 to 31 December 1993 and a longer term of three years from 1 January 1994 until 31 December 1996. The structure of a proposal to US funding agencies will emphasize the former but must necessarily include an outline of the latter. The proposal should have the following form: 1. Executive Summary 2. An Introduction that will: a. stress the importance of standardization, reusability, usability, the relevance of TEI tagging for information access, and the importance of TEI header information for library cataloging, among other things; b. provide a description of the current status of the project as of June 1992; c. contrast the TEI effort explicitly with other SGML-based activities and show how it relates to other international standardization efforts; d. show the relationship between the TEI and the National Research and Education Network (NREN), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the High Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC), the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Network of European Reference Corpora (NERC), the European Expert Groups on Linguistic Engineering (EAGLES), and other relevant European, Japanese, and US activities. 3. Activities to be undertaken a. Transition Period b. Long Term Project 4. Budgets a. Transition Period b. Long Term Project 5. Conclusion a. Credibility of the TEI effort b. Continuing support from the EEC c. Establishment of a Japanese program During the Transition Period, the TEI will maintain the same organizational structure, staffing levels, and mode of operation that have been in place for the past four years. The major focus will be on completing the Guidelines and arranging for publication and distribution. It will also be necessary to prepare, modify, and update reports; add tutorial and casebook materials; conduct evaluation and usability studies; engage in education and dissemination activities; and, in general, promulgate, promote, and evaluate the TEI Guidelines. TEI-chartered work groups will continue to expand areas already identified during the first four years of the project and to explore new areas for possible extensions. The editors and the work group participants will establish relations with other organizations doing similar work to insure compatibility and to eliminate duplication of effort. A major product of the transitional period will be the preparation of a proposal for future work. The objectives of the Long Term Project will be to: (1) extend the depth and coverage of the Guidelines and other TEI documentation so that they satisfy the needs of most major groups working on textual data; (2) promote the the production of texts in TEI format and encourage the use of the Guidelines for textual interchange; (3) support the development of appropriate software and interface design that will make it easier to work with these texts. The Long Term Project explicitly recognizes that there are many other organizations and activities addressing goals similar to those undertaken by the TEI. Accordingly, the program of work for the Long Term project will have two major emphases: (1) continuation of the TEI activities begun in the initial four year project and extended through the transitional period, complemented by new projects along similar lines; (2) coordination of the TEI efforts with other research and development activities directed toward the encoding and interchange of machine-readable texts. As a consequence, the funded structure for the long term project would be complemented by an extensive voluntary structure in which work at universities, research institutes, and other industrial facilities was coopted by the TEI and coordinated systematically with the TEI program. Because of the broadening of the scope of the program, and because of the participation of the Japanese (representing East Asia, more generally), there will be a change in organizational structure. Instead of having two editors, the Long Term Project will be guided by three directors, located in Europe, Japan, and the United States. The directors will work under the supervision of a Steering Committee, which will represent the professional societies sponsoring the effort. In addition, members of the community who contribute scientifically to the objectives of the TEI will be appointed to an Advisory Board or Council that will provide technical guidance. It will be necessary to establish an institutional base for the TEI. Although the major focus will continue to be scientific and technical, the coordination efforts of the Long Term Project will require an increased amount of administrative support. One of the directors will be responsible for supervising the staff necessary to carry out this work. The combination of technical and supervisory responsibilities makes it essential that this director have a full-time position with the TEI. It also seems desirable for the office of this director to be located in an institution whose role is related to the work of the TEI. Among the possibilities to be considered if the TEI Office is in the United States are the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH); a center established at a college or university (e.g., Vassar) specifically for this purpose; one of the institutions centrally involved in the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI); and one of the nodes in the National Research and Education Network (NREN). Comparable locations must be identified in case the Office is in Europe or Japan. [One of the issues to be considered in Scotch Plains is whether the TEI should be incorporated, or whether grant proposals should be submitted through the Sponsoring Societies or through the institutions with which the TEI is affiliated.] I. TRANSITION PERIOD (1 January 1993 to 31 December 1993) A. ACTIVITIES 1. Prepare, modify, and update reports 2. Develop additional tutorial and casebook materials 3. Conduct evaluation and usability studies a. exploit the affiliated projects b. involve other projects that have not participated in the development effort 4. Promote education and dissemination activities a. publications b. workshops c. tutorials 5. Support software development a. evaluate current software b. identify software needs c. coordinate with software developers d. plan for future software development 6. Continue Work Group activities a. linguistics b. speech c. literature d. history e. physical description of texts f. hypertext and hypermedia g. dictionaries h. computational lexica i. others as appropriate 7. Extend Work Groups to new areas a. show how TEI tags can be used for information retrieval and access b. develop alignment mechanisms for multilingual corpora c. develop alignment mechanisms for coordinating speech with speech transcriptions d. explore science and engineering applications in comparison with other SGML-related activities outside the TEI e. evaluate the relevance of database technology 8. Establish relations with other organizations ISO, HYTIME, Infoterm, CNI, NREN, LDC, DCI, CLR, ARL B. BUDGET (1 January 1993 to 31 December 1993) [in US dollars] Salaries at UIC: Sperberg-McQueen, Plotkin, Stanfield 75,000 (including fringe benefits and overhead) Salaries at Oxford: Burnard & secretarial/staff support 25,000 Dissemination 20,000 Travel Editors 20,000 Steering Committee 40,000 Work groups 35,000 Tutorials and workshops 20,000 Computational resources, supplies, etc. 20,000 -------- $255,000 These funds should come equally from US and European sources. Some funding from Japan might be available, although we do not anticipate a major Japanese contribution to the budget until the Long Term Project. NOTES: 1. Overhead of 38% is included in UIC salaries. Other figures include 10% overhead. II. LONG TERM PROJECT (1 January 1994 to 31 December 1996) A. ACTIVITIES (to be elaborated by the Steering Committee on 12 July) 1. Extend the Guidelines and promote their use a. prepare additions and revisions b. promote education and dissemination activities c. conduct evaluation and usability studies 2. Motivate the development of software and interface design a. coordinate with software and interface developers b. specify, test, and evaluate new design features 3. Continue existing TEI Work Group activities [need examples] 4. Establish new TEI Work Group activities [need examples] 5. Coordinate with TEI-related activities internationally a. identify and catalog ongoing projects b. work closely with other groups to ensure compatibility with TEI efforts and to limit duplication of effort B. BUDGET (1 January 1994 to 31 December 1996) [in US dollars] 1 year 3 years Salaries: Full-time Director 60,000 189,150 2 half-time Directors 50,000 157,625 1 full-time staff member 30,000 94,575 1 full-time secretary 26,000 81,965 2 half-time secretaries 26,000 81,965 ------- ------- 192,000 605,280 Overhead at 40% 76,800 242,112 Operating costs 200,000 630,500 [need to itemize classes of expenses: office, computing, publication and dissemination, tutorials and workshops, staff travel, work group travel] Steering Committee Travel (2 meetings/year) 30,000 90,000 ------- --------- TOTAL 498,800 1,567,892 If the budget is supported equally by North America, Europe and Japan, the expenses would be approximately $170,000 per year for each. NOTES: 1. Salaries include fringe benefits and are average annual costs with a 5% increase in the second and third years. 2. An overhead of 10% is included in non-salary costs. 3. Travel for SC has been calculated on the basis of holding 2 meetings in Europe, 2 in North America and 2 in Japan over 3 years, with membership/attendance of 4 North Americans, 3 Europeans, 2 Japanese, and on costs for trips as follows: 1 trip Europe-NA = $1500 1 trip NA-NA = $800 1 trip Japan-NA = $2500 1 trip Europe-Eu = $800 1 trip Japan-Eu = $2500 1 trip Jap-Jap = $800