[tei-council] Report from Paris

[Lou-at-home]

The joint ISO/TEI workgroup on feature structure representation met in
Paris this week. The current draft for ISO 26410 was
worked through in some detail with ISO experts and a large number of 
stylistic and clarificatory modifications  proposed. Part 5 of the 
current draft, which corresponds with chapter FS of the TEI P5 draft, is 
more or less untouched, except that a foolish error was detected which 
needs to be corrected. Minutes of the meeting (taken by one of the ISO 
reps) detail the other changes, and are now available from 
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/FS/fsm02.html, which also includes the 
proposed timetable for concluding the document and sending it out for 
national ballot as a DIS -- hopefully to be done within the next month 
or so.

A gang of four (Kiyong, Harry, Eric, and I) meeting in the corridor
after the formal end of procedures also decided that the scheme would be 
improved no end by just a few renamings. So, at the next iteration, I 
propose to make the following changes:

- <var> will be renamed <vLabel> and its LABEL attribute will become NAME;

- <fLib> and <fsLib> will lose their TYPE attribute and should use the N 
attribute to name themselves for now.

- <vcoll> will be renamed <merge> or possibly <vMerge>

Otherwise, I think we all felt it was time to declare victory and move 
on to consider feature system declarations, which (or some equivalent) 
will constitute part 2 of the proposed DIS. It is hoped to set up a 
similar joint TEI/ISO workgroup to address this topic, under a different 
chair, but with several of the same participants. More on that later.