[tei-council] summary of SO WG outputs

[Syd Bauman]

Action SB by 2005-12-31: Circulate summary report on SO workgroup
			 outputs to date
---------
The TEI Work-group on Stand-Off Markup, XLink and XPointer ("SO") was
conceived and authorized by Council at its January 2002 meeting in
London, and actually formed and charged the following summer. The
group, chaired by David Durand, has never had a face-to-face meeting,
met by conference call an average of ~ twice per month during its
first 1.5 years of existence, but has not met since then. The group
has produced several papers, some of which supersede others. Those
that have been superseded are listed last.

* SO W 02 "summary of technical rationale for decisions on XPointer
  and stand off markup"
  http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow02.xml?style=printable
  Last updated 19 Nov 03. 
  White paper on issues, particularly ID v. XPointer.
          
* SO W 04 "Notes on Media formats and XPointer"
  http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow04.xml?style=printable
  Last updated Fri, 17 Oct 03.
  A useful paper by Chris Caton that basically recommends the use of
  SVG and SMIL in TEI documents. I am sorry to report that this paper
  has been almost completely ignored by Council, as I think the
  approaches it recommends should at least be seriously considered and
  debated.
  Note: when Chris says that entities are depreciated, he means
  attributes of type ENTITY, not entity references.
          
* SO W 05 "Corpus Applications"
  http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow05.xml?style=printable
  Last updated Thu, 06 Nov 03.
  A somewhat incomplete paper that requires technical updating to
  match current recommendations, that nonetheless deserves attention
  as it offers advice on markup up various linguistic properties of
  texts, particularly in the context of large corpora. The original
  propose of this paper was to demonstrate the use of various
  techniques described in the chapter on linking, segmentation, and
  alignment, but I suspect a lot of the advice it gives should be in
  the chapter on Language Corpora.
          
* SO W 06 "Stand-off Markup"
  http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow06.xml?style=printable
  Last updated Tue, 06 May 03.
  This is Fabio's paper on XInclude, which DD and I are currently in
  the process of re-working and inserting into the chapter on linking,
  segmentation, and alignment. (I *think* this is probably the paper
  Lou was referring to on the conference call, and I was just confused
  that he was referring to something newer -- Lou, if Fabio has done
  something since that I'm unaware of, please let me know.)
          
* SO W 07 "Graphs"
  http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow07.xml?style=printable
  Last updated Fri, 02 May 03.
  Also by Chris Caton, this paper analyzes how RDF might be used to
  encode graphs (and therefore trees) instead of TEI-specific markup.
  He basically encodes the example in P4 using mostly RDF. I just
  noticed, however, that the colors in the examples are no longer
  coming through.

* SO W 09 "Basic working decisions on pointing and linking"
  http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/sow09.xml?style=printable
  Last updated Sat, 02 Oct 04
  On or about its conference call of 2004-03-29, Council requested
  that the WG (i.e., DD) produce a summary document of its decisions
  and recommendations so far, particularly in the area of XML's
  ID/IDREF mechanism and W3C's XPointer Framework. This is that
  summary document.

* SO W 01 "Differences Between XPointer and the TEI Extended Pointer
           Mechanism"
  This document has been superseded by SO W 02
 
* SO W 03 "Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment"
  This document has been incorporated into P5.
          
* SO W 08 "Canonical References"
  This document has been incorporated into P5.

In addition to the above papers, the WG has produced a proof-of-
concept Perl program that converts TEI P4 extended pointer syntax to
XPaths. I have not been able to run it for awhile, though, as the
underlying library it depends on for parsing has changed. It is at
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SO/exp-conv.tgz.