Draft minutes of 2010-04 Council meeting

Archival version is now at http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Council/Meetings/tcm45.xml

The following are minutes of the 2010 Council meeting, held April 29-30 in Dublin.

morning of 2010-04-29
Attendees:


 * Brett Barney (BB)
 * Lou Burnard (LB)
 * James Cummings (JC)
 * Matthew Driscoll (MD)
 * Kevin Hawkins (KH)
 * Julianne Nyhan (JN)
 * Daniel O'Donnell (DoD)
 * Elena Pierazzo (EP)
 * Dot Porter (DP)
 * Sebastian Rahtz (SR) - minutes
 * Laurent Romary (LR) - chair
 * Susan Schreibman (SS)

Review of Symposium
Meeting started at 9:30 WET. JN presented an overview of the public Googledocs document, in which she had recorded notes from the previous day's Symposium on TEI and Scholarly Publishing. From the various presentations and discussing, she has distilled points under two main headings: "Emerging themes" and "Specific issues with P5." She briefly summarized these.

LR asked the group to consider what implications these points have for the Council. DO clarified a point raised about open-source publication and anti-trust concerns, suggesting that US anti-trust laws present no real barrier for cooperation of the kind the Council wants to promote.

LR noted that several projects are trying to create a TEI customization to fit their publication workflows and wondered whether we should we put effort into such a customization. SR asked whether, in doing so we would we be, in effect, re-creating the tagset of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). LR noted that both Martin Holmes and LR have both worked with NLM mappings, so we could start there. SR suggested the alternative of re-expressing the NLM in a TEI ODD. KH noted that NLM is DTD only and therefore cannot use namespaces. SR said that mapping NLM to TEI would require the use of lots of attributes, which users don't like to be forced to. LR, however, said that because NLM is so closely modeled upon TEI that the mapping is really easy. DO suggested that what we may need is a cooperation with NLM: We might get the user community together first to discuss needs and then build the customization, a la TEI TIte. LR argued that the features and needs for a customization are already well-Identified because customizations have already been done in different places, so it might be the time to take what each group has done, work out a single customization for consideration, and present it for consideration. DO suggested that the real issue is to find Council members who have the energy to drive the work. KH said that it's not a question of will but an uncertainty about what to do. He noted that in the US, academic publishers' prime concern is to do something that lets them lose less money. JC asked why, in the last 20 years, the movement toward a standard hasn't from the presses themselves. DO said that he was struck by the fact that everyone in publishing has been/is focused on the page but that, even so, there are a lot of people working at the presses who &lt;emph&gt;are&lt;/emph&gt; interested in the kinds of things we are interested in. The problem is that no one has the money to fly people around to collaborate. If we take the resp. of guiding collaboration, things could happen. Our role would be getting tool-makers together to talk about how they're doing what they're doing. He sees Dot's work on image markup as a model. LR thinks we could pretty easily put on the table a first draft of an ODD for publication. DO asked what it is they're lacking, then, since in doing what LR is proposing we would essentially be looking at their problem and solving it for them. LR responded that what's lacking are answers to questions such as Where do you put the abstract? How do you structure author attribution/citation/bibligraphical notations? What should be used as standardized type attribute values for divs? etc. DO suggested that the best way to address these issues would be to bring together energetic and interested Council members with some of the people at the symposium. LR disagreed, saying that there's already a publishing SIG. Some discussion followed about the advisability of putting out a call that would allow people from both groups to volunteer. KH argued that we will only get buy-in from publishers if the customization we produce comes with good tools (e.g., stylesheets for producing PDFs or Kindle-formatted texts), since the publishers don't have the luxury to support long-term development of such tools. SR argued that TEI doesn't have the resources to support tool development either. DO argued that that's where the people we saw yesterday (i.e., those who are making workflows) come in. DO proposed that we convene a summit of people from NLM, TEI, etc. LR acknowledged that we don't have the budget to implement tools, but noted that we have people who are working on these issues, so we wouldn't have to promise tools; we could just make sure they're on the agenda. SS suggested that an NEH startup grant might be a good opportunity to get the thing off the ground. EP noted that she has been involved in a project to convert CML (Cambridge) to TEI. There followed short discussion of procedural matters involved in coordinating work on this issue with the SIG and whether it would be best to structure the work through the existing SIG, some sub-group of the Council, folks from industry, or some combination of these. In general, DO favored asking publishers to provide input so that we can build something appropriate, and LR favored producing something to present to publishers. SR favored first defining a manifesto before attempting a customization. KH proposed that a sub-group of the Council (viz., JC, LB, SR, Martin Holmes, LR, and DO) write up a vision (using Googledocs), present it for feedback, and then maybe apply for grants. All agreed.

--10 minute break --

Discussion of "green" feature requests

 * 2971316 - Add @svg:points to att.coordinated
 * no objections; much rejoicing.
 * 2969870 - &lt;surrogates&gt; for digital &amp; its examples
 * general agreement.
 * 2949985 - &lt;idno&gt; in more than just bibliographic elements
 * Following a brief discussion in which LR et al. parsed the similarity of &lt;idno&gt;, &lt;num&gt;, and &lt;term&gt;; in which LB opined that a phrase-level &lt;idno&gt; would not be a good idea; and in which the classes &lt;idno&gt; might be added to were discussed, it was agreed that &lt;idno&gt; should be added to model.nameLike.
 * 2728061 - Add @target to relatedItem
 * LB has restricted the scope of the original proposal, so the issue at hand is whether the Council agrees with the proposed restriction. After quite a lot of discussion, mostly about whether text and/or references should be allowed within relatedItem, LB noted that there seemed to be broad support for allowing for content within &lt;relatedItem&gt; and that we should generate examples.

Discussion of "green" bugs

 * 2946056 - order of children of profileDesc
 * After some debate such things as whether &lt;creation&gt; should be repeatable, Council agreed to add it to model.profileDescPart, perhaps also adding a Schematron rule to prevent its being repeated.
 * 2863331 - 'Used by' section empty in model.physDescPart
 * not controversial; SR knows has this on his to-do list to investigate and fix.

Discussion of "amber" feature requests

 * 2976608 - Add &lt;ref&gt; as a child of &lt;analytic&gt;, &lt;monogr&gt; and &lt;series&gt;
 * Numerous example use cases were put forth, and the Council agreed to the change as proposed.
 * 2973254 - Allow @target (or &lt;ptr&gt;) on &lt;divGen&gt;
 * DO et al. argued that this request would amount to a hack for replicating the functionality of XInclude. JC pointed out that the TEI website uses OpenCMS, which doesn't allow Xinclude. Council members generally agreed that, while hacks could be countenanced in such situations, they shouldn't be written into the spec.
 * 2940838 - CALS for TEI
 * This request grows out of a discussion between LR and SR regarding Sebastian's use of CALS in ISO. LR clarified that the request isn't that we take up responsibility for CALS itself. In response to KH's question whether the proposal is that we "make CALS available" just via a reference in the prose of the guidelines, LR responded that he would like to see, at minimum, something in Roma to allow CALS. SR opined that perhaps no action by the Council was needed. After further discussion of whether we should support CALS through the TEI Sourceforge site. It was decided that this request should be added to the roster for further discussion later in the meeting.
 * 2925145 - Generic dating class
 * Following a summary of the request by LB, JC noted that it's not the TEI that's saying you have to use the Gregorian calendar, but ISO. DO pointed out that we've done this sort of things for &lt;dimension&gt; (@unit). Observing that the request obviously warrants debate, LR moved the request to the roster for later discussion.
 * 2919640 - global @facsKey
 * It was agreed to close this ticket, as @facs currently permits any of the 3 options Sebastian outlined in his comment. The Council favored Sebastian's choice "a" and agreed that the guidelines should be amended to include recommendations and/or examples regarding how to implement this suggestion.


 * 2909766 - make &lt;del&gt; and &lt;add&gt; (etc) dateable
 * On the advice of SR, the Council decided to defer further discussion of this request until they had an opportunity to consider the recommendations of the working group on genetic editions.
 * 2890254 - ability to define new element with same name as an existing
 * It was decided to defer further discussion of this request until after the discussion of ODD.
 * 2859355 - &lt;subst&gt; should permit textual data
 * It was decided to defer further discussion of this request until after consideration of the recommendations of the working group on genetic editions.
 * 2859183 - Make all milestoneLike elements spanning
 * It was decided to defer further discussion of this request until after consideration of the recommendations of the working group on genetic editions.
 * 2834511 2834511 - Add more elements to att.spanning with schematron constraint
 * It was decided to defer further discussion of this request until after consideration of the recommendations of the working group on genetic editions.
 * 2834505 2834505 - @cert on choice and model.choicePart
 * JC clarified the rationale and LB suggested that the desired facility already exists. As there was some disagreement, it was decided that this request should be added to the roster for further discussion later in the meeting.
 * 2812634 2812634 - @docStatus on &lt;edition&gt;
 * All that we need is for someone to write some prose for the documentation.
 * 2811239 2811239 - new element 'object'
 * There were quite a few different opinions expressed about what's desired and/or proposed. Lou suggested making the request red. LA suggested, instead, that we ask Gabby to provide clarification, after which the Council will reconsider the request.
 * 2811239 2811234 - add @ref to 'material'
 * No objections.
 * 2794512 2794512 - Move &lt;space&gt; to core module
 * LB suggested a revised proposal: a new element (perhaps named "spacer") be added to the core module. After some discussion of whether &lt;milestone&gt; is what's wanted, it was agreed that the request warrants more discussion.
 * 2783323 2783323 - add @from and @to to choice
 * It was decided that this request should be added to the roster for further discussion later in the meeting.
 * 2531384 2531384 - Rationalise application of @target
 * It was decided that this request should be added to the roster for further discussion later in the meeting.
 * 2493417 2493417 - &lt;idno&gt; coverage
 * It was decided that this request should be added to the roster for further discussion later in the meeting.
 * 2298442 2298442 - ODD should customize ODD
 * It was decided that further discussion of this request should be deferred until after discussion of ODD+.

Presentation of Genetic Workgroup Proposal (EP)

 * 3 parts to proposal:
 * Sections 1-5: Addition of documentary view of text to main TEI structure
 * Sections 6-10: proposals for additions to transcription module
 * Genetic encoding

Discussion

 * DP pointed out problem that @reason is almost exactly the same as @cause
 * Discussion of whether tei:subst should be able to contain cdata: general reluctance.
 * Issue of @instant: this indicates immediate correction at given stage; values=true|fault
 * DO notes relative rarity of attributes with true|false values in TEI; suggests that it might be better to have a more generic attr for which "instantaneous" is a value as this will allow for the inevitable request for additional values from the community.
 * Proposals on Genetic Encoding per se (i.e. stages and the like)
 * This will await the finishing of the collation and apparatus modules
 * Issue with naming of proposed stage elements noted: stageNote, for example, is a well-known type of text structure in theatre.

Action and Next Steps

 * The council accepts transcription group report in principle, recognising that significant changes may be still necessary
 * The council would like to publish the proposal for use by the community, on condition that it is recognised that changes may still be made that break initial material
 * The council will break the sections into SF tickets as proposed by Lou (broad terms) and James and Elena (specific items that could be broken off into non-controversial tickets.

Bibl Report (LR, KH, MH)

 * Most of the council discussion focussed on reviewing the principles proposed by the group.
 * Council disagreed with proposal to use examples to suggest good practice (by suppressing examples of alternate coding). It felt it was important to be explicit in the text as well about what was good and bad practice.
 * To avoid breaking existing documents (and recognising that bibliographic data can come in a variety of forms, some of which make it necessary to accept less than optimal encodings), we will recommend rather than require the practices suggested by the sub-committee
 * The following are tied to the corresponding points in the committee's report:

1) The above meta principles apply

2) DITTO

3) Accepted with the exception of name-internal punctuation: e.g. O'Donnell, Smith-Marbles, E. B. White

4) Same as 1: yes subject to meta-conditions.

5) accept

6) [Get Kevin's summary]

7) Leave as is but acknowledge that life is difficult: e.g. you might well have mixed blbstruct and bibls. Leave example.

8) The failure to reflect the proposed values for @type as listed in the guidelines was a bug. But the larger issues about article scope vs. actual citation is more complicated and is to be reexamined by the sub-committee.

Lou and Kevin are to work and implement the easy issues in the odds; sub-committee is to clean up document in light of discussion and return to council with a clean version by June 15, with comments to follow by a deadline to be determined.

reports of small-group discussions of feature requests
Council members met in groups of two or three to discuss various tickets that were unresolved after yesterday's discussions. Below are notes from reporting back.

CALS for TEI (2940838) – Laurent reported that he, Dan, and Kevin decided on these things to do: (1) add a reference to CALS in the Guidelines as an alternative way to encode tables and (2) use Sebastian's ODD that he developed for CALS as part of his work with ISO [?] to include in the TEI (much like MathML and SVG in the TEI).

Sebastian noted that we actually have a private re-implementation of MathML and SVG by incorporating these from the standard [at the time of ODD generation?]. He also noted that "CALS" can mean many things, not all of which are clearly defined, but most people use it to refer to the CALS exchange model, which is well-specified. He said we need to talk to Norm Walsh [who is our best contact for CALS].

Laurent said the third thing to do is to contact Norm Walsh.

Dan asked Sebastian whether his ODD needs polishing before public distribution. Sebastian replied that ____ and said he just needs a namespace to use for CALS elements.

Lou asked to clarify that there was consensus not to include CALS elements in the Guidelines. Everyone agreed that we would not do so at this time.

generic dates (2925145) – Dot reported that she, Elena, and James discussed a ticket proposing to create att.datable.generic for normalizing dates using non-Gregorian calendars and dating systems. She said they like the idea but are unsure of implementation. James added that the datatype would need to be so loose that it basically becomes free text.

Elena said that ____ would need a new date element.

James said that the ticket proposes a new form of canonical referencing, which Elena noted would need to be defined in the header.

Laurent asked whether we should attempt to rework the proposal or send it back to the author to re-propose in a different form. Dan replied that there's a risk that a new proposal would be less TEI-like.

After a discussion, it was agreed that Elena would summarize the possible ways forward [for the proposer of the ticket]. Lou asked her to monitor the ticket for future discussion and proposals.

allow @cert on choice and model.choicePart (2834505) – Julianne reported that she and Brett discussed this ticket, which included an alternative suggestion in the comment to allow @cert on seg. She and Brett did not like the latter idea, but they also didn't like the original proposal since too many attributes would be allowed on choice and model.choicePart.

Instead, Julianne and Brett proposed to make all elements in model.choicePart members of att.responsibility.

allow @to and @from on choice (2783323) – Julianne reported that she and Brett also discussed this ticket. She said the proposal is in the spirit of the TEI, but she noted that some good alternative encodings were also suggested on the ticket. She said they would like to know what Christian Wittern (who proposed the ticket) thinks of the alternative encodings. She noted that the Guidelines give no examples of @to and @from on app, so it's hard to compare the alternatives.

Dan said that @to and @from are on app because of the possibility of there being a lemma, whereas choice doesn't have these because it doesn't assume the existence of a lemma.

Brett summarized the use case given in the ticket. Elena noted that the proposal provides a simple mechanism for accomplishing something like stand-off markup, but she said it's not clear why we wouldn't allow these attributes on all elements. Laurent and Lou agreed that we need a more generic standoff mechanism and shouldn't create a hack for use only on choice.

Dan noted that, for the use proposed, that there are existing mechanisms (@ref and @key) for pointing to controlled vocabularies and an existing mechanism (app) for encoding a lemma.

allowing non-numbers in idnos and alllowing idno in author (2493417) – Sebastian reported that his group discussed a proposal to allow idno to contain non-numeric identifiers such as URIs and DOIs. His group agreed with this proposal to add idno to model.nameLike.

As for allowing idno in author, the group realized that author already has a content model that appears more flexible than desired (for example, allowing add and del), so they proposed to correct this by changing the content model of author of model.limitedPhrase. Kevin gave a use case for add and del within author: encoding a typewriter manuscript of a draft of a work with a bibliography, where the bibliographic citations are encoded using bibl or biblStruct, in which the author made corrections to author names.

After discussion, consensus was reached to no longer change the content model to model.limitedPhrase but still allow idno in author. Sebastian noted that this will have the side-effect of allowing people to use idno anywhere they might use author (not just within a bibl or biblStruct). He questioned whether we really want to do this. There was discussion.

Lou noted that having idno as a child of author goes against the principle voiced yesterday that elements should describe their parent. Kevin said there are many ways in which markup requires human inference to fully understand it and that this surely is not the only place where a TEI element does not describe the parent.

It was decided to create a separate feature request for ____.

space in core module (2794512) – Dan said the issue is that the example is actually a transcription: the space is important because it appears in the layout not because it has a rhetorical or linguistic meaning--e.g. the leading space in a indented paragraph. So if it is important, you should invoke transcription. The confusion is that gap has two meanings one appropriate to transcription and one appropriate to non-transcription circumstances (such as sampling). Gap was originally omit (sampling) but rename expanded semantically to cover the transcription situation in the move from P2-P3.

We need to indicate in the Guidelines that gap has two distinct meanings: one appropriate strictly to transcription (illegible//missing) and the other (sampling) more generally applicable. We might also want to consider resurrecting P2's omit for the sampling application and say that gap should be used only for transcription (reversing the P3 decision).

Dot said that we want to recommend to David Sewell (the ticket submitter) that he use space (from the transcription module).

[http://# target/targets (****perhaps ticket number 2531384****?)] – Lou reported that there are 8 cases in the Guidelines in which @target takes a single value and 8 others in which it takes 2. Only 4 of these instances have the attribute value defined by an attribute class. His group proposed to introduce an attribute class for all instances of this attribute which would allow 1 to many values. However, the prose of the Guidelines will need to explain that for some elements, it doesn't make sense to have multiple values for @target.

Once this change is made, it will no longer make sense to use the @targets attribute. We will leave this attribute in the Guidelines but discourage its use. The three elements that have the @targets attribute should be added to the new attribute class.

It was also agreed that the discussion of cRef on the ticket should be "spun off" into a different ticket.

hyphenation (and orthographical changes at line breaks)
Lou summarized the debate on appropriate use of the soft hyphen character, which is closely related to the question of how to encode hyphenation when also encoding line breaks.

As he explained, if you are transcribing early printed books with hyphens at the end of lines, there are a number of ways to do it. If your goal is to transcribe text, including hyphens, faithfully or to encode the text in a way that will allow you to process lexical items (generally speaking, words) without marking up these words with w elements, you will need to represent hyphenation in the source document.

If your encoding will mark line breaks (using lb), this complicates the method for encoding hyphenation and requires any tokenization software to be capable of ignoring elements that can appear within words (like lb). Alternatively, a derived text with lb and other intraword elements removed could be produced for the concordance software from the master encoded text.

In short, the Guidelines are currently not helpful in giving guidance on encoding hyphens that appear to be accidents of line breaks (where a hyphen would not appear in the word had there not been a line break). It has been suggested to use the Unicode soft hyphen character for these cases, and Lou initially thought this would be appropriate; however, Deborah Anderson asked senior Unicode people about this and they told us that use of the soft hyphen for such cases is inappropriate. (The soft hyphen is meant for cases where processing software might choose to break a word, not where it was previously broken.)

If we instead used the lb element, how would you indicate whether the word was broken across lines? You might use the type attribute to indicate whether a lexical unit has been broken by the hyphen [as recommended in the element definition for the lb element], use whitespace before the element, or use the rend attrbute to describe the hyphenation. Lou suggested using the type attribute to indicate whether the hyphen marks the boundary between lexical items and the rend attribute to describe how this boundary is indicated (using a hyphen, semicolon, etc.). With this method, no hyphen is left as character data in the XML document.

Elena said this is exactly how the Austen project handled hyphenation.

[Alternatively, the hyphen could be left in the text and no rend attribute used.]

Lou continued that this leaves the problem of handling hyphenation of words across line breaks in languages like Dutch and German, where letters within the word are sometimes duplicated before and after the hyphen. Juliana noted that Old Irish did something similar.

After discussion, it was decided to use the choice element to handle such cases.

Lou said that it's not clear where to put the lb element and said it would seem you would need to repeat it. Brett suggested a standoff choice element. Elena said that the Austen project used xml:id and corresp. Matthew said that [some project he was involved in] used sameAs with xml:id.

Brett noted that we still haven't given advice on how to handle ambiguous cases (where it's not clear whether the source document's author would have used a hyphen had there not been a line break).

After discussion, it was decided that users could use any of the following values for the rend attribute for cases of ambiguity:


 * hyphen
 * soft or hard hyphen
 * ambiguous

Lou asked whether the Council needs to give advice to ____ or to those revising the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries (both of which had questions about this issue). Kevin said those working on the Best Practices would use the Council decision in order to revise their work.

ODD (r)evolutions
Sebastian said several tickets have been submitted for problems with and suggestions for the ODD architecture. A mailing list ["tei-meta"] was formed to discuss the future of the ODD system, but there was little discussion. He summarized the desired changes that were detailed in a message to the list on 2010-04-02.

Laurent noted that the proposal for including and excluding elements individually assumes that there's something behind ____ that is pointed to.

There was discussion of the proposed changes.

Dan noted that these changes work best for elements that are in classes but asked how it would affect elements not in classes. There was further discussion, during which Sebastian said that there would need to be a "magic module" -- a TEI module that would automatically select ___.

There was further discussion.

Laurent asked whether we should provide an explicit mechanism to say which ___ [is/are] in the TEI [module?].

There was much further discussion.

Dan and Laurent said we need to have the source [of what?] specify itself to avoid ambiguity. Sebastian disagreed that there's any ambiguity.

Brett asked whether all elements would be included or excluded by default. Sebastian said that currently _____.

There was a discussion on the merits of including or excluding elements as you go while constructing a project-specific schema.

Council agreed to support the the further development of ODD.

Sebastian noted that we will have a problem with combining elements with the same name from different namespaces. Currently, our classes are named after exemplary elements, but it wouldn't be clear which namespace these exemplary elements belong to. He suggested three ways to fix this:


 * 1) Change the way model classes are specified in the ODDs.  This unfortunately breaks any ODDs currently in use.
 * 2) Use namespaces in the names of model classes.  This would not be valid RelaxNG, but it's perhaps such a feature could be suggested to the RelaxNG developers.
 * 3) Create fake namespaces within the names of model classes, perhaps using the raised dot Unicode character as a delimiter (since it's one of the few characters allowed where needed).

Kevin suggested choosing the first option but adding a feature to Roma that will upgrade any existing ODDs when they are uploaded to use the new system of model classes.

Dan asked whether the first solution still leaves the problem of the third solution. He suggested a fourth solution: adding an attribute (perhaps called "prefix") to the element specification in the ODD language.

After discussion, Council decided that Sebastian will choose the best way to handle homonymous elements from different namespaces. Dan added that he should strive to make ODD mechanisms generalizable beyond the TEI.

afternoon of 2010-04-30
Reconvened at app. 1:15

On LR's suggestion, the council reviewed the amber bug reports and summarized each.


 * 2964254
 * KH summarized, saying that according to element definition of, "term" is misused. Short discussion regarding the location of the problem in the guidelines followed.


 * 2963461
 * SR: This is an implementation problem.


 * 2955059
 * Discussion of history of use. Conclusion is for LB to clear up discussion of use cases in the guidelines.


 * 2945206
 * Problem with Vesta


 * 2938882
 * Problem with Vesta


 * 2938735
 * LB: For historical reasons, @hand of att.transcriptional is declared as data.pointer, but the @new  is declared as data.code
 * It was decided that this would be treated further in the break-out sessions


 * 2932853
 * Agreed to make consistent (see LB's comment at SF)


 * 2915506
 * LB summarized J Walsh's use case, which involved use of in tabular data. LB opined that this was tag abuse. Council members were unable to imagine alternative scenarios in which label as described might need . SR floated alternative suggestion of including in macro.phraseSec. No need for changes of any kind at this time.


 * 2900430
 * EP and DO favor first proposal. LB noted that redefining will break backward compatibility. EP noted that the second proposal ( with  children) wouldn't break backward compatibility. LR proposed that for now we agree that a mechanism is needed but that we defer a decision about the specifics until the key/ref decisions have been made. Agreed.


 * 2714682
 * KH: Compassed by the proposals and actions put forth yesterday.

---Breakout---

Reconvened at 2:05

First report (EP)

 * Propose using @hand and deprecate @new on 
 * Propose rejecting the request to make @hand global attribute. Reason: doesn't solve the overlapping problem.
 * Propose revising the guidelines to recommend using  at the beginning if you will use it later.
 * Propose revising the guidelines to recommend similar use of all milestone elements.


 * LB brought up the use-case of the First Folio, but he agreed after discussion that it doesn't present a problem.


 * Propose a new element for quire-breaks.
 * [some debate]
 * LR Noted that this has already been added as a SF ticket
 * EP also noted that the issue of uncertainty whether a hand is A or B was not addressed.

Second report (KH)

 * 2900430
 * Decided they prefer having one or more elements w/in . Should you believe that there are nested terms in a compound subject term like "History -- Russia", such is already allowed by nesting term elements.
 * Examples in guidelines will need to be changed.

LR: We have thus dealt with all of the amber bugs & feature requests.

2:20

LR: Would like to treat @key / @ref and deprecation mechanisms.

--small break--

LR: We need a way to have a "soft" deprecation, a way of explaining to the community that they shouldn't use a certain practice that was formerly allowed/recommended. We don't want to enforce a strict mechanism (one that breaks compatibility). Proposes that in future (minutes, etc.) we use "deprecation" in this way.

[discussion of where the deprecation takes place. DO, e.g., floats idea of an appendix in which all things marked as deprecated are gathered.]

General agreement that we need a formal way of marking the deprecation (e.g., ).

DO: proposes a small working group, but this proposal was not met w/ enthusiasm.

Discussion of creating some way to flag not only deprecated practice but also recommended practice. Reference to ISO and W3C uses of "required" etc.

LB: We had two ways of noting the canonical home of an item: @key or @ref. John Walsh wanted a "magic token" pointer for @facsKey. Occurred to folks that URIs need not be URL. Proposal is to deprecate @key and make clear that @ref can be used.

SB: If there are places where only @key is available, do we add @ref (moduleRef)? Do we recommend a way to compose the "magic token"?

LB: There's a syntax for URN's, so that's one option.

LR: What are the opinions of folks outside the TEI?

LB: Some geeks have said it's OK. Objections incl. that we should use registered URNs.

Discussion about

- persistence assumption in URN scheme.

LB: Proposal is to continue to allow @ref to use A URI, which can be a URN, but it doesn't have to be.

JC: Do people think that the TEI should be registering themselves as a proper URN?

[seems to be affirmation]

SR: Original problem that John Walsh raises can be solved other ways, too. E.g., he can use a local web service that resolves an arbitrary identifier.

KH: Or we could also recommend that users register a URN.

[people seem to like this option]

KH: Are we OK withLou's recommendation that we prefer @ref?

[unanymous agreement]

LR: Issue of synonyms (e.g., @lemmaRef vs. other elements that just use @ref).

KH: We should probably also change examples in the guidelines that use (only) @key (to add also examples w/ @ref).

LR: Summary: We have a set of guidelines for dealing w/ @key at large. This will allow us to deal with several outstanding issues:


 * If the semantics of the @ref are implied, you just call it @ref; otherwise, (e.g., scribeRef, @lemmaRef).
 * We recommend anchoring URN mechanism when possible, but unregistered URNs are allowed (and allowed by W3C as well).
 * We will change the guidelines.

Wrap-up
SR: Do board members have anything they want to the Council to consider?

SS: Encouraging participation of Council members in the SIGs.

DO: Proposes assigning new Council members to a SIG and expect a report.

[discussion of the problem that comes from people rotating off]

DO: will put in a feature request to have a more formal system of rep. of Council members on the SIGs:


 * correspondence
 * education
 * libraries
 * manuscripts
 * music
 * ontologies
 * scholarly publishing
 * text and graphics
 * tools

JN: the journal's publication of the "getting started" document.

LR: It was a great idea, but probably too ambitious to take on as a Council project. But the existing TOC and what's already there are good.

JN: What about authorship attribution of the existing material?

LB: No sense that there is a strong feeling on the Council that they want to retain ownership.

JC: Does the council want to have a regular place in TEI-EJ to say, "This is what's been happening"?

LR & JN: Probably not a good idea.

[discussion of the maintenance of the TEI website (stable URIs to bits of the guidelines; new newsServer; status of material in the vault)]

Action item: SR will contact David Sewell about putting search box in guidelines on the TEI site

LR: We've made good progess. The publishing issue: Our wrap-up after the mtg. didn't completely satisfy him. He will need to talk more with Ken. Hyphenation was a productive discussion.

EP: Having the manuscripts proposals accepted in principle is satisfying. Thinks it is essential that the SIG has space to put things (put up different versions of the documents, acknowledge people who have contributed, etc.).

DO: Action has already begun to have this happen.

LR: Plan is to use the "feature request" system, right?

ER: Yes, will do this with Lou. There are certain existing feature requests that should be closed because we've decided on other protocols for handling them.

Action item: LB will close these.