GeoLang TC minutes: Seattle meeting

Time and place

The meeting was generously hosted by Boeing, in their facility at Renton, outside Seattle, WA, USA. The meeting was held at 2002-03-14, 1630-1800.

Attendance

In addition, the following people were present at the meeting, without becoming members of the TC: Sam Hunting, Suellen Stringer-Hye, Patrick Durusau, Scott Tsao, Eric Freese, and H. Holger Rath.

Formalities

The agenda presented by the chair was unanimously accepted, the OASIS TC process and IPR policy were then reviewed, as was the TC charter.

No TC members were appointed to formal positions within the TC. The chair will fill these until the workload becomes too heavy.

Standing rules

The TC unanimously adopted the following standing rules for the conduct of the TC's work:

• Only TC members will be allowed to subscribe to the TC's private list (geolang).
• All email discussions will be conducted on the TC's public list (geolang-comment), although formalities relating to meetings and concalls will be handled on the private list (geolang), in order to reduce noise on the public list.
• Voting via email is acceptable.

The policy of the TC will be to conduct most of its work via email, and to only use F2F meetings sparingly, and concalls not at all, unless especially required.

Liaisons with other bodies

The issue of possible liaisons with other organizations was discussed, and a number of relevant organizations were brought up. The actions decided were as follows:

PubSubj TC

There is clearly a close relationship between the work of these two TCs, and Steve Pepper offered to act as formal liaison between the two TCs.

OASIS ebXML-related TCs

These TCs will need identifiers for languages and geographical locations, and so there is clearly some relationship between the work done in the TCs. Sam Hunting kindly offered to contact these TCs and inquire what needs they had. The chair will take formal responsibility for this liaision, as Mr. Hunting is not a member of the TC.

W3C Semantic Web activity

The RDF specification produced by the W3C Semantic Web Activity needs identifiers for languages in the form of URIs. As this is precisely what the GeoLang TC intends to produce it seems clear that the two groups should communicate about this. The chair will contact the W3C in this regard.

IMAGI

An Interministerial Committee for Geoinformation established by the German government, with the purpose of creating an infrastructure for public geographical information in Germany. Thomas Bandholtz kindly offered to assume responsibility for this liaison.

EMELD

A research group at the University of Arizona is conducting a project called EMELD to produce an ontology for linguistic information and an archive of information for endangered languages. Part of this work will be to define identifiers for these languages. The chair will contact this group to see if there is a need for some form of liaison.

Ethnologue

The Summer Institute of Linguistics has a very extensive database of information about the languages of the world called the Ethnologue. Part of this database is a three-letter identifier for every language. This code set seems an obvious candidate for a published subject set. Patrick Durusau kindly offered to contact the SIL on this issue. The formal liaison will be handled by the chair.

Japanese Industrial Standards

The Japanese Industrial Standards Committee has defined two JIS standards with geographical identifiers. One being JIS X 0401, which has two-digit codes for representing Japanese prefectures, the other being JIS X 0402, which has three-digit codes for referring to cities, towns, and villages. Naito-san will handle the formal liaison with JISC.

Discussion of issues

A number of issues relating to the production of the final PSI sets were discussed.

The list of deliverables given in the charter was reviewed, and accepted.

Proposals for the first two deliverables already exist, and were produced by Murray Altheim. Murray, however, has not published these, and has decided to withdraw from further OASIS work for personal reasons. It was therefore decided to charge the chair with producing the initial proposals for review by the TC.

A number of issues relating to these two published subject sets were discussed at the meeting, but it was decided to discuss them in more depth via email before reaching any decision on most of the issues. The chair assumed responsibility for starting these discussions.

Meeting schedule

The next face-to-face meeting of the TC will be Friday 24 May, in conjunction with the XML Europe 2002 conference in Barcelona.