OASIS Topic Maps Published Subjects Technical Committee
Pubsubj > Meetings > 2002-12-13

Meeting Minutes : 2002-12-13 : Baltimore

Meeting Notes: Patrick Durusau
Review and Publication: Bernard Vatant
Updated: 2003-01-04.

Attending Members
Bernard Vatant, Lars Marius Garshol, Steve Pepper, Peter Flynn, Holger Rath, Don Smith

Excused Members
Thomas Bandholtz, Suellen Stringer-Hye, Jim Mason, Eamonn Neylon, Mary Nishikawa, Michael Priestley, Vivian Bliss

Invited Guests
Patrick Durusau, Eric Freese, Motomu Naito, Tom Passin

1. Quorum

Vivian Bliss and Don Smith prospective membership period being over, they should be accepted as voting members. But the quorum for this meeting is not achieved, whatever the counting : 5/11 if Vivian and Don are not taken into account, and 6/13 if they are. This meeting is therefore not enabled to vote any decision.
Some members have not attended the three last meetings. They will be reminded by the chair of OASIS guidelines concerning attendance.
Suggestion to try IRC meetings. Peter proposes to moderate a first one, since he has experience on it.

2. New prospective members

Patrick Durusau (SBL), Eric Freese (Lexis Nexis), Motomu Naito (Synergy Incubate) ask to become TC members. They will send by e-mail a formal confirmation of that request.

3. Minutes from Montreal

Default quorum, the minutes will be submitted to approval by e-mail

4. Deliverable 1 final draft

The final draft published by Bernard has been submitted to revision by english native speaker, namely Steve who proposed to do it, but eventually passed the baby to Patrick. The editorial work of Patrick is much appreciated in the introductory part, but he seems to have made some substantial changes on the content of requirements and recommendations, that are discussed and rejected.
Steve will make the synthesis of Patrick's prose and previous draft, and will send it for final vote and approval, ASAP and hopefully before the end of the year.

5. Organisation of http://psi.oasis-open.org

  • The namespace http://psi.oasis-open.org has been made available to host PSIs published by OASIS TCs.
    A provisional content has been set up by Lars Marius. Definitive content and structure of this page has to be discussed.
  • Discussion on the structure of URLs in that namespace. Two requirements proposed by Steve for the URLs : be as short as possible (but not shorter), and carry certain semantics, so as to be human-friendly whenever possible. General agreement on that, but human readibility shall not override URL stability. For example GeoLang choice for numeric codes in countries' PSI stands on stability considerations: alpha codes would carry more semantics but are known to be less stable in ISO 3166.
  • The structure should also be extensible and usable by other TCs.
    Including TC name in the URL seems a bad practice, since TCs are likely to be unstable entities.
    On that basis, recommendation to change URLs used in GeoLang draft,
    e.g. from "http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso639/#foo" to "http://psi.oasis-open.org/iso/639/#foo".
  • Should directory URLs be used as PSIs, and if yes, for what subjects?
    No general consensus for that. If a directory URL is used as a PSI, it has to be explicit in the directory index.
    For example : http://psi.oasis-open.org/iso/639/ could be used as PSI for the set of PSIs defined in the directory, or as a PSI for ISO-639 standard. Both are needed, but the URL can't be used for both.     In that specific case, decision is that it will be the PSI for the PSI set (see below). Making it a general recommendation or not is a pending issue.

6. Discussion of GeoLang draft PSIs

  • GeoLang has published a draft of PSIs set at http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso639/
    This set is discussed to see how it fits general recommendations and what issues are raised.
  • Lars presents the structure: title for PSI set, introductory text, then human readable metadata, underneath links to machine readable metadata, split into metadata about the PSI set, then basic assertions about the language, then section with actual indicators, 3 individual ones, then individual ones with explanations, giving all the information the standard has.
  • Discussion about title. Is it to be used as a name of the subject set? In that case, relevancy of inclusion of "Published Subjects for" in the title is discussed. Using it as a "machine-readable-prefix" is considered, but does not bring consensus (might raise issue, e.g. for further creation of PSI sets registries). Agreement to keep "Published subjects for languages in ISO 639" anyway as title in the HTML page.
  • Discussion about the human-readable metadata. "Source" has to be added.
  • Discussion about machine-readable metadata. Findable through LINK elements in the HTML HEAD element.
    Need to register an XTM MIME type. Suggestion to have some Dublin Core in the header.
  • Redefine the PSI for the PSI set to be the URL of the page. Having both
    "http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso639/#psiset" and "http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso639/"
    would lead to confusion.
  • Should put something about copyright at the top of the page.
  • All suggestions pushed into GeoLang to comply.
    Turn back to pending issues for Deliverable 2, and see which have been addressed through GeoLang use case.

7. Next meetings

  • IRC meeting Jan 23th 1300 UTC, to try if it works for everyone, the agenda being the schedule of London meeting.
  • Further IRC meetings or conference calls to be fixed.
  • F2F meeting at XML Europe London in May. Day to be fixed.