UPDATED: [tei-council] draft agenda for TEI council telecon2005-12-16 1200 UTC

[Conal Tuohy]

> Christian Wittern <wittern at kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes:

> 3) Proposal for new work items
>  
>   We need to decide on where we want to go this next year.  
> We should have
>   enough money to fund about one WG meeting (in Europe, ~6 members?)
>   beside the Council meeting. 
> 
>   Proposals floating around ask for a personography task force (I take
>   task force to mean, as we used the word earlier, a group charged
>   with a rather specific task and a lifespan in the order of 6 months)
>   and a page-linking task force.  
> 
>   Are there other areas in urgent need of attention? We need to think
>   about how to prioritize this and allocate our efforts accordingly

I have only one other item: more explicit identification of external
vocabularies used in TEI taxonomies. 

I would like to establish guidelines for explicitly linking to external
vocabularies via URI, so that indexing and cataloguing software can more
easily merge metadata from TEI documents in bulk, i.e. to promote
commensurability of the indexes. At the moment the guidelines provide
for an external vocabulary (a <taxonomy>) to be identified with a bibl,
but I'd like us to endorse a way to include a URI as part of that
identity, to facilitate merging. 

It's probably an easy one I think, but it is important to us in NZ.

We need it to help us to construct a union catalogue from TEI documents
which are independently encoded and catalogued by a number of agencies.
The NZ government has recently launched a "National Digital
Strategy"[1], and things are starting to happen ... we have the prospect
that a large number of "community" agencies of all types may soon be
digitising, encoding, and cataloguing texts, so we will need some clear
guidelines soon. Also we have other agencies locally (here and in
Australia) adopting TEI for encyclopedia applications, where this is
also useful. It's also potentially useful to the Ontology SIG I would
think.

In general (and this applies to the page-facsimile issue too), we are
trying to make it easier for the National Library of NZ to adopt TEI as
a general rule for text encoding. This is not yet a fait accompli. I
think there's a risk that some half-baked (non-TEI) solution will catch
on, especially (a cynic might say) given the involvement of Microsoft[2]
(I know - I'm running a risk writing this using Microsoft Outlook!). 

That's it from me.

Cheers

Con

[1] http://www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz/
[2]
http://www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz/templates/Page____268.aspx#Can%20trai
ning%20be%20funded?