OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects Technical Committee
Pubsubj > Meetings > 2002-08-10

Meeting Minutes : 2002-08-10 : Montréal

Meeting Secretary, Review and Publication: Bernard Vatant
Release: 2002, August 14.

Attending Members
Bernard Vatant, Lars Marius Garshol, Mary Nishikawa, Peter Flynn, Holger Rath, Michael Priestley

Excused Members
Thomas Bandholtz, Suellen Stringer-Hye, Jim Mason, Eamonn Neylon, Steve Pepper

New Prospective Members
Vivian Bliss (Microsoft) and Don Smith (Isogen) attend the meeting and request to become participating members.

Invited Guests
Patrick Durusau (SBL), Nikita Ogievetsky (Cogitech), Eric Freese (Lexis Nexis)

1. Approval of previous meetings minutes:
Approved with no comment

2. Short Review of current TC work and status:
This review seems necessary for everybody, both new and "ancient" members ...

  • Review of Charter
    It is needed to tune the Charter with the actual current TC work and orientation. A New Charter proposal has been already posted on the TC Web Site, but more time is asked by members to review it.
    It will be discussed and voted on-line.
  • Structure of Deliverables
    The structure of deliverables proposed in Barcelona has been approved.
    It is agreed that Deliverable 1 should and could be delivered ASAP (before end of September)

3. Discussion of Deliverable 1

  • Introduction
    Needs to be polished and be added some illustrating diagrams. Needs also to be added some clear exposition of what will be addressed by this deliverable and what issues will not (e.g. structure of identifiers and indicators)
  • Requirements
    Consensus is that URNs should not be recommended as PS Identifiers, default of a specific resolution process. Use of non-resolvable URNs is ruled out by a new expression of Requirement 2, getting rid of the condition "if the URI is an URL". The Requirements are now expressed as following:
    • A Published Subject Identifier must be an URI.

    • A Published Subject Identifier must resolve to an human interpretable Published Subject Indicator.

  • Recommendations
    The content and expression of Recommendations is revisited throughout, focusing on Publisher and Metadata.
    • Publisher: long debate on what it means, if it is a specific information or if it should be included in the general subject metadata. Consensus is that the notion is critical and should be declared independently of any other metadata, but that it is still ill-defined in the Web universe.
      Decision : stick to Dublin Core definition, which is not very precise but is available and widely used standard.
      A new definition in a similar context would lead to nothing but confusion.
    • Metadata: Make distinct recommendations for human-readable metadata, machine-processable metadata, and their necessary consistency.

The whole recommendation list is redefined as following (subject to re-wording and refining)

    • Published Subject Indicator should provide human-readable metadata
      (included in resource or referenced from it).
    • Published Subject Indicator should provide machine-processable metadata
      (included in resource or referenced from it).
    • Human-readable and machine-processable metadata should be consistent (but not necessary equivalent)
    • Published Subject Indicator should indicate that it is intented to be a PSI.
    • Published Subject Indicator should identify its publisher.
  • Example
    • "Apples and Oranges" example has to be purged of some recommendations that do not belong to the scope of this deliverable, like those concerning URIs "human-readable semantics" and use of the "PSI" token.
    • Specific syntax given in the example should be well thought out.
    • XTM is ruled out at that stage, could be introduced by Deliverable 2. XHTML and RDF are still in.
    • The example should also be explained in terms of, or at least illustrated by, diagrams.
    • The use of fragment identifiers is still open. It is thought that they will be used anyway (e.g. by GeoLang)
    • It is agreed that the editor (Bernard V.) should work out the example, since the original author (Steve P.) seems not likely to have the bandwidth to achieve this task.

4. Roadmap and next meeting(s)

Bernard will propose ASAP a new and complete draft for Deliverable on the basis of the above decisions. This draft should be close to be the final one for this document, with the aim of review and approval before end of September.

Next F2F at the end of Baltimore XML 2002, on December 14th.
Conference Call(s) in-between to be decided on the basis of on-line work, with a 3 weeks notice delay at least.