Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Dave Pawson – Royal National Institute of the Blind
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Mark Hakkinen, Daisy For All Project
• Linus Ericson, Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Laurie Sherve, Scribe – DAISY Consortium

Participating Experts:

• Chris Wilder-Smith – CAST
• Neil Soiffer – Design Science
• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare

Apologies:

• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – Danish Library for the Blind
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille

Agenda

The agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee's list on 2005 November 08. There were no amendments in advance of the call.

There were no additions to the proposed agenda.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

GK proposed that the next call be held on 2005 December 07.

New (Returning) Advisory Committee Member

Markku (Mark) Hakkinen, DFA is re-joining the Advisory Committee after approximately a one-year hiatus. Mark and Marisa are part of the working committee on smil Next Generation (NG). The latest version smil 2.1 is incrementally but not largely different from smil 2.0. The group is determining if enough momentum exists to move forward on smil NG, or possibly create another incremental update to the version. The working group is considering how to bring navigational semantics into the smil presentation, more DAISY-like navigation features, and improved text handling capabilities. DAISY must be ready to comment on suggested changes to smil.

Zed Advisory Committee f2f meeting

It was decided not to schedule a face-to-face meeting until a definite agenda and subsequent deliverables were decided upon. Neil Soiffer would like to present the first extensibility recommendations of the MathML committee to the Zed Advisory committee in January. Issues, errata, and future directions will be handled by email and ad hoc conference calls with the committee. The controversy between using Relax NG and XML Schema will be an item for the f2f to address. In planning f2f meetings we should look at the possibilities of piggy-backing with another meeting such as the DAISY Technical Conference currently under consideration.

Issues Tracking

This was an integral part of the f2f meeting discussion. Issues will be resolved by email and by adding ad hoc issue specific conference calls. This may be above and beyond regularly scheduled committee calls.

ISSUE: Codec Agnostic

Neil Bernstein submitted an issue via email describing why the DAISY/NISO spec should be codec agnostic. NLS has decided to use the AMR-WB+ codec. Use of this codec is not supported by the DAISY/NISO 2002 or 2005 standard. Prior to this decision, NLS weighed the change of codec on nine factors including audio quality, bit rate, random accessibility, cost and licensing.

However, when surveyed, no one in the group wants the standard to be codec agnostic. Placing specific codecs in the standard was not a mistake, but the result of heated discussions with many groups. No errata to the standard will be issued. The issue needs to be reopened and discussed.

There is some urgency to resolving this issue, as NLS will be producing books conforming to the Zed 2002 version except the audio format. NLS would like the books to be labeled as DAISY conformant.

Items on agenda, but not covered

	     Issues

		   - (ISSUE) Element list with semantics is needed.
		   There is no expanded xhtml file for current specification and DTDs.
		   This was a part of the 2002 version. How can we provide the
		   equivalent or better documentation?