Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Boris Goldowsky – CAST
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Participating Experts:

• Kathy Kahl, Scribe – DAISY Consortium
• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• Lynn Leith – DAISY Consortium
• Laurie Sherve – DAISY Consortium

Apologies:

• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Rob. Longstaff – Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB)
• Peter Osborne – Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB)
• Diana Hiorth Persson – Dolphin

Agenda

The agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee's list on 2007 March 06. There were no amendments to the agenda in advance of the call. There is one addition to the agenda, being Marisa's report regarding the SMIL conference call.

Two attachments were sent with the agenda:

1. Notes from various scribes at the F2F Conference
2. Summary of the F2F Conference by George

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The next conference call is for 2007 April 04, 0900 Eastern USA. The US changes clock time ahead one hour on March 10, two weeks earlier than usual. Europe does not change clocks until later. Clock synchronization should be checked before the next call announcement.

Copenhagen Face to Face Meeting Notes

A F2F meeting was held last month in Copenhagen. Attendees were Ole, Thomas, Romain, Marisa, Linus, Boris, Markus, George, Dominique, Rob, Pete, Diana, James, and Julien.

The Notes document is a concatenation of the notes from the various scribes. It was agreed that these notes are to be posted unrestricted in the minutes area on the DAISY Web site.

The Summary document is also to be posted unrestricted after a minor revision and each committee member is asked if they would show it to the head(s) of their respective organizations. George asked if the document presented a strong enough case for moving forward with modularization and requirements gathering. George will send it to the DAISY Board for input and comments, and will ask if the document is sufficiently convincing or if additional information/argument is required. Budget considerations and questions are expected.

Boris will be added to the Advisory Committee, as well as both Neil and Lloyd who will follow up with NLS regarding participation plans. Anticipating the restructuring that will happen with NISO, this will leave 3-4 open seats.

Identifying the Sub-divisions of Work

NISO

Pete, George, Kathy and Lynn will develop a work plan through at least June to cover issues such as overarching plans, budget items, communication and messaging with NISO.

Maintenance

There is a working group in place which can proceed separately regarding Zed maintenance so no need to spend a lot of time on this now. Briefly there are several issues related to documentation.

1. Lynn is revising the Structure Guidelines (SG) with Laurie's help. This update will get rid of many documentation issues currently outstanding.
2. CAST and gh LLC will collaborate with the DC to develop documentation that supports the SG with references to the NIMAS tag subset. It will include best practices and incorporate images from print books that illustrate usage for each element. The full DAISY tag set will be included. gh LLC will develop the content with the costs covered by CAST and the DC. This is something that the publishers have been requesting.

Architecture of Modular Specification Development

The architecture working group includes Dominic, George, James, Marisa, Markus, Ole, Romain and possibly Julien. A chair for the WG is needed. Markus could chair if work started in the autumn.

The goal is to have a deliverable explaining how the modules will work together for TechShare in early October. See the last heading from the end in the Notes document: Process (as captured by JP). James and Marisa, and Markus separately have more post-conference development notes on this. James, Marisa, and Dominic will initiate an outline by email using the new zed-architecture list for this group, and Markus and Ole will find time to review before August. A potential 3 day F2F meeting in August is possible. This would help solidify the deliverable once other members of the group have available time. George pointed out that the DAISY travel budget is very limited.

How to Proceed with Requirements Gathering

George asked if it would be a better time to start requirements gathering when we reconstitute under NISO as a new entity "larger than the Digital Talking Book". Requirements gathering could reach a broader scope by being announced through NISO as well as through DAISY to the groups identified in the Notes document. This was left to see what evolves in the discussion with NISO.

George requested feedback when talking to NISO about opening up the spec for review and possibly changing the name. The NISO call will most likely happen before the next Zed conference call. The decision about what name to choose does not need to be made now, but the need for a name change should be brought up since it may change the process with NISO.

Naming issues mentioned as desirable are: consistency, keeping the name 'DAISY' in it, as well as 'accessible'. Lynn suggested that the name mentioned in the Summary document that makes sense and sounds good to those who were in Copenhagen is "The Digital Accessible Information Specification for Digital Audio, eText and Multimedia". This name includes information about the three profiles that people need to know about; however, the question was raised whether it is clear enough for people not familiar with the DAISY spec to make the connection that this is something new. The point was made that the people that we are trying to reach are mainly outside of the current DAISY spectrum.

SMIL

Marisa reported that in the last SMIL conference call, she gave a review of the Copenhagen discussion regarding the proposal to modularize the DAISY specification.

The idea is that modularization will allow profiling for both simple and complex multimedia presentation authoring and playback. SMIL also allows profiling, and a multimedia-rich profile for DAISY in SMIL, planned for incorporation into DAISY-Next, is almost finished. The big limitation on SMIL profiling is that so much functionality has to be included even to call something "SMIL" that it would be impossible for DAISY to use SMIL in its flyweight profile for simple media uses.

Marisa brought this up with the SMIL group, and she is now in charge of leading the activity on a 'SMIL Tiny' profile within the SMIL specification. DAISY's flyweight requirements, as they emerge, will influence this work. There is no promise from DAISY that the flyweight profile will use SMIL at all, but the idea is that if SMIL could accomodate this scenario, it would be more likely that it would be used. Another consideration is that SMIL 3.0 will be released sooner than DAISY-Next. According to the SMIL group, given the rules (in the SMIL specification) for making a simple SMIL profile, users like DAISY should be able to make adjustments and customizations on their own without affecting the SMIL specification.

ACTION ITEMS Carried Over on Agenda from F2F