Minutes of the Tools SIG Meeting in Ann Arbor, 14 November 2009

The working meeting of the Tools SIG was held on November 14, 2009, at 10:00 a.m., in the Hatcher Graduate Library North, Ann Arbor (US).

Present


 * Lou Burnard ( Oxford) [first half of meeting]
 * Thomas Crombez (Antwerp)
 * Øyvind Eide (Oslo)
 * Serge Heiden (ENS Lyon)
 * Alice Hickcox (Emory)
 * Patrick Rashleigh (Wheaton)Serge Heiden called the meeting to order at 10 a.m.

He rapidly presented the impressive agenda for the meeting that had circulated on TEI-L (See http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0911&L=TEI-L&P=R127).

He then suggested to use the rest of the short (50min) meeting to fix new goals for the revival Tools SIG (born on the defunct TEI Presentation SIG), some priorities and to decide how to organize the work and communication between participants and the TEI community.

Communication
Lou suggested that most information concerning tools on the TEI wiki is out of date.

Serge suggested that there are duplicate information about tools on the official TEI web site and the TEI wiki.

Serge asked for a clarification of the editing process between the two web sites and if the main effort concerns up to date information, to concentrate on the wiki site.

Participants agreed that the TEI wiki is a good tool to communicate on tools.

Patrick suggested to edit a minimal introduction page on tools, that could be more user friendly that a bare category list of tools.

Serge suggested to add a direct link to the Tools SIG wiki page from the main page to ease people find their way.

Audience
Participants agreed that the editing process should distinguish several target audience for those pages : TEI new comers, TEI users and TEI tools developers.

Information about tools
For each audience, there was a discussion about the pertinence of information about tools.

For users, some useful information related to tools could be : HOWTOs, typical Workflows and good tool taxonomy.

For developers, some useful information could be : precise if a tool is complete and autonomous or just a component, and if it is finished or in progress.

The role of tester users has been discussed and connected to the availability of test corpora, but no responsibility was taken about that subject.

About test corpora, interest was expressed in the description of “one file” versus “thousand files” type corpora and about standoff markup.

Lou introduced the “TEI demonstrator” project (DARIAH funded) at MPI in Berlin giving the possibility to put free access TEI corpora online.

The role of information editors about tools has been discussed, but no responsibility was taken about that subject.

Web Search Engine
Thomas and Øyvind discussed about the way to make TEI encoded corpora more compatible with web search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. A relation was established with the microformats to extend HTML : vCard/hCard, geolocation, etc.

The meeting adjourned at 11:00 a.m.

Submitted by Serge Heiden