GeoLang TC minutes: Baltimore meeting

Time and place

The meeting was held at 2002-12-14, 1200-1400, in room 315 of the Baltimore Convention Center.

Attendance

Formalities

John Cowan's employer is no longer an OASIS member, and so he has been forced to resign. Eric Freese and Peter Pappamikail became full members at this meeting. Patrick Durusau expressed his interest in becoming a member of the TC, and so is a prospective member.

The minutes of the previous meeting were unanimously approved, as was the agenda.

Meeting content

The meeting for the most part concentrated on evaluations of the proposals for the ISO 639 and ISO 3166-1 published subject sets produced by the chair. The chair was instructed to produce new drafts based on these discussions as soon as practically possible.

Numerous minor editorial changes were made to the proposals during the meeting in response to feedback. The main decisions made were:

• The form of the subject identifier URIs should be http://psi.oasis-open.org/iso/XXX/#YYY.
• External machine-oriented metadata in RDF format should be included.
• Dublin Core metadata in the HTML document should also be included, using the meta element type of HTML.
• The descriptive paragraph that is the first paragraph on the page should be the subject indicator for the published subject set.
• The names of the XTM files should be 639-core.xtm, 639-metadata.xtm, and 639-mapping.xtm.
• The 639-core.xtm file should include all the language codes as occurrences.
• The 639-core.xtm file should include instanceOf elements assigning languages to classes based on the guideline given in section 4.1.1 of ISO 639-2. The mul and und subjects should not have explicitly defined classes.

It was said in the PubSubj TC meeting the day before that the ISO 639 are represented in uppercase. This turned out to be wrong: ISO 639 is lowercase while ISO 3166 is uppercase.

Action points

The follow tasks were assigned to TC members:

• LMG will verify whether the terminological or bibliographic codes are the most stable and use whichever are the most stable.
• LMG will attempt to find a way to format the table to avoid wrapping.
• LMG will look at making published subject indicator document conform to both OASIS Specification style guidelines and OASIS Published Subject documentation guidelines, and provide input to the OASIS PubSubj TC as to how the former could impact the latter.
• LMG will update the ISO 639 and 3166 published subject sets in accordance with decisions made at this meeting, and create a list of issues that come up while doing so.
• LMG will verify that the French term 'Groupe de languages' is indeed correct.
• Patrick Durusau will write up recommendations for what published subjects should be defined by the OASIS PubSubj TC for machine-oriented metadata for published subject sets, based on 639-metadata.xtm.

Chair

The chair expressed his desire to resign, on the grounds that he does not have sufficient time for to administrate the TC properly. The meeting accepted his resignation and appointed Mary Nishikawa as acting chair until a new chair could be elected.

Meeting schedule

The date of the next meeting will be decided by email once the OASIS Published Subjects TC has decided on the date of its next meeting.