Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Ole Holst Andersen – Danish Library for the Blind
• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – Danish Library for the Blind
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Tom McLaughlin – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Dave Pawson – Royal National Institute of the Blind
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Jennifer Sutton, Scribe – DAISY Consortium

Apologies:

• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Markku Hakkinen – DAISY for All Project
• Michael Moodie – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Agenda

The agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee's list on Tuesday afternoon, November 2. there were no amendments in advance of the call.

1. Welcome Marisa and Ole

The group was pleased to have OHA continue to serve in a more official capacity. MdM sent her regrets from Amsterdam and expects to begin participating on the next call.

2. Agenda Additions

There were no additions to the proposed agenda.

3. Minutes from October 21, 2004 (2004-10-21) Call: Process for Approval, Ready to Post

The minutes from the October 21, 2004 call are almost ready to post on the NLS site. It was agreed that the format would remain the same, except that JS would include heading "id"s to facilitate linking fragments from the minutes, should that functionality be required.

4. Participation Email: Ready to Send

It was agreed that the email to solicit additional participation on the Committee had been thoroughly reviewed and was ready for distribution.

4.1. Z39.86-IG List

JS raised the question as to whether the proposed Z39.86-ig was intended to be a one-way only list for announcements. After some discussion, it was agreed to use the DAISY Consortium's technical-developments list, already in existence, rather than establishing a new list.

5. Recurring Schedule for Conference Calls

It was suggested to have a conference call once a month, while still leaving open the possibility of scheduling additional calls (such as having one every two weeks) as needed.

6. Developing Work Plans

In the originally posted agenda, GK listed a number of the major topics that the Committee needs to consider as it develops its work plan to move toward the next revision of the standard. One of the first steps is to establish a system for tracking issues.

The group must develop a tracking system, set timelines, and agree to the scope of work. In order to facilitate at least beginning this process, JS thoroughly assessed all previous minutes. She compiled a set of five files in which she categorized notes and possible action items. This set of files was initially distributed to GK on 2004-10-16.

One approach may be to assess items to determine whether they are old, new, accepted, rejected, etc. It may be that an XML-based framework could be established, similar to the production tool requirements system recently used by the DAISY Consortium.

7. ZedVal, Update and Test Map

LR indicated that the two primary bugs discussed on the 2004-10-21 call have been resolved. TmC indicated that the test map has been started for the z39.86-2004 version of ZedVal.

JP indicated that NLS has received version 1.0.1 of ZedVal.

Overall issues remaining for consideration are:

• ZedVal-2002 handling of DAISY full-text, such as the content from Bookshare.org
• Further development of the ZedVal-2004 test map with any amendments to be moved in from what has been learned with ZedVal-2002
• Consider the requirements for validating the sample content developed during the World Cultures and Geography project
• NLS's possible work on developing a more friendly user interface

Via the list discussion, the group will come to consensus regarding essential tasks first, and then, the work will be completed.

8. Developing Work Plans, Continued (focus on modules)

The list of possible items for inclusion in the work plans, as sketched in GK's agenda, included ZedVal maintenance, as well as:

• Structure Guidelines
• Sample Materials, World Cultures and Geography
• sample 2004 content
• modules approval process with possible modules including:
  • DRM
  • Video work group
  • Mathematics work group
  • other modules
• thinking about a face-to-face
• Thinking about possible API(s) development in support of the standard (extend the face-to-face)
• Other work items

The group touched briefly on some of these issues.

It was noted that sample XML content that is related to the Structure Guidelines is required. In addition, sample content that conforms to z39.86-2004 is also needed.

Some work has started, with respect to establishing a Video work group and a Mathematics work group, but the Advisory Committee needs more information regarding the status of these two projects.

The Advisory Committee began to discuss the idea of modules, generally. This was a continuation of a discussion the group began in Madrid in the fall of 2003. Questions raised during the discussion were wide-ranging and included:

• Which language will be used for modularization? Schema? Continue with DTDs? The rules of the grammar determine what functionality is possible. The language (or approach) must be chosen first, although content need not be ported to it right away.
• Are XHTML modules adequate, at least as a possible short-term solution?
• Does the Committee need to modularize the specification first before, for example, incorporating the W3C's current recommendation for MathML?
• Is the standard a conversion DTD, or is it to be used for creating raw material?
• Does the specification need to be re-optimized to support modularization?
• What are the overall goals for having modularization? Who will be impacted by choices? It will be important to assess all aspects of the standard, including SMIL 3, as well as the needs of player developers, consumers, etc.
• Is it possible to outline the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches?
• How would XHTML modularization work? Can some of the already-existing XHTML modules be adopted outright? MathML and SVG have been designed to plug in as XHTML modules.

It was stressed that any mechanism should have failure modes and fall-back behaviors so that players and consumers will not be caught off guard.

Generally, GK is suggesting that there need to be short-term solutions, even as the group continues to work toward more long-term approaches. It may be that an example of a short-term modular solution, such as for Math, is presented to the community; however, there would be no guarantee of a road map for migrating such content.

It will be helpful if there is an exchange of information so that the Committee can learn from attempts already in development or being implemented successfully.

9. Work on Math

JP reminded the group that he had posted some examples of Math, as it might be incorprorated into DTBook. It may be that the short-term solution(s) for incorporating Math need to be more widely publicized.

The group may solicit other samples, such as via the Tech.-Dev. list, of Math as it has been created in the context of DTBook.

10. Next Conference Call

The next conference call of the Advisory Committee will be held on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 from 9:00 – 10:00 EST. This means 7:00 Mountain, 9:00 Eastern, 14:00 UK, and 15:00 Copenhagen and Stockholm.