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
• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Boris Goldowsky – Center for Applied Special Technology
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

• Lynn Leith – DAISY Consortium
• Jennifer Sutton – DAISY Consortium

Apologies:

• Kenny Johar – Vision Australia
• Kathy Kahl – DAISY Consortium
• Diana Hiorth Persson –Dolphin
• Rob Longstaff – Royal National Institute of Blind People

Agenda

The call agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on March 4. There were no additions to the agenda.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The next conference call is 2008 March 19, 1000 EDT (1400 UTC). The call following this is scheduled for April 2. The FTF meeting is scheduled for April 15-17 in Palo Alto.

Update on Errata page and Structure Guidelines

The Structure Guidelines for 2008 have not yet been finalized. There have been no further changes to the Errata page. Note that no deadlines for completing these tasks were set during the call.

NISO Update

George indicated that he would contact the NISO office to follow up regarding whether an announcement would go out. Lloyd noted that, at that time, the monthly newsletter had not yet been distributed.

Subsequently, the March issue of the NISO newsletter was distributed, and Jennifer and George observed via private email exchange that no mention of the DC's work was made in it.

On March 16, George posted a message to the Zed list that suggested that it might be helpful for George to have a phone conversation with Karen and/or Todd, to make sure all are on the same page.

Wiki/Blog Discussion

Let's talk about what we want for our work moving forward:

• It was agreed that the ZedNext Wiki would continue to exist, especially for collaborative writing projects. Julien is going to use the Wiki as the place to post his paper regarding a proposed modularization plan, going forward. This paper will reflect the plans as outlined by the Mod Squad meeting in early February. Julien will post this paper by the end of March in preparation for the face-to-face meeting.
• Markus indicated that the ZedNext Wiki would be for the Maintenance Committee to do its work, such as, perhaps, collaboratively drafting portions of the next specification. The ZedNext Wiki space will not be available for public editing, but only for viewing. Committee members who need them will have passwords so that they can edit.
• No timeline was established for fleshing out the Wiki space, nor was it made clear as to whether we need to try to move the current version of the Standard and accompanying documents into a wiki. We will use MediaWiki, for now, with the idea that that information will be ported to Confluence when the time is right.
• It was agreed that a wiki is the right tool, rather than a blog.

Human Resources, Modularization, and Advancing the Standard

The Requirements that have been submitted so far indicate that there is likely to be a good deal of work to develop the next version of the Standard:

Urgent Items

Items that seem to have some urgency include:

• a "container" which is similar to a zipped fileset or the "OCF"
  See Requirement "ZIP archive as directly supported DTB package format" and Requirement "Single file distribution"
  • (Further ideas related to the "container" included the trade-offs with adopting a DAISY-type file extension and the drawback that such content would be unlikely to play in an MP3 player.)
• preserving presentation in content output
• more control over the XML vocabulary

Human Resources

Modularizing the Standard is one "chunk" of work, and then developing the individual modules is another "chunk." The question was raised as to whether we have the time and human resources to work through the Standard, as a whole, or whether we might be able to work on it via individual modules – piece by piece.

Would we gain enough if we modularized the 2005 Standard i.e. port it to the modular structure/architecture, and then move from 2005 to ZedNext? If we took this approach, the modularized 2005 Standard would not be a public product that was put forward for comment; rather, it would be an internal effort. If the 2005 Standard were modularized first, it would help to confirm that the idea of modularizing the functions worked, along with the process itself.

• Markus noted that this is NOT how the Mod Squad has been proceeding. James suggested that this approach could be seen as an intermediate step. The idea would be to NOT bring in new features until the structure for the next Standard is clear.
• As Markus described it, the Mod Squad has been envisioning an iterative ladder-like approach. Markus is suggesting that the DC adopt an approach like the one that the W3C uses.

Modularization

If little modules are released, they would not fit in a frame (or be able to be viewed in a larger context/picture of the Standard's future). The idea of proposing small modules might also be difficult to market. Releasing small drafts might work.

Breaking up the Standard might make it easier for different stakeholders to adopt.

Marisa indicated that SMIL Timesheets have received positive responses because they are lightweight, and people can absorb it, rather than having to understand the entire SMIL specification. George asked Marisa whether the DAISY Profile for SMIL is implementable, and Marisa indicated that it is pretty compact. It builds on the SMIL 3.0 Tiny Profile.

How could we support backward compatibility with DAISY 2005, for example, if we released a DTBook module?

The conclusion seems to be that we should work iteratively, internally, but not so for the public. Each iteration should not go through the NISO process. This relieves some of the possible pressure of the work load.

Advancing the Standard

Parallel Tool Development

If we look at what we have learned from the 2002 and 2005 Standards, perhaps what would be ideal is to provide production tools at the same time as the next version of the Standard is released. This approach would help support the Requirement "Reference implementation of the new specification" to have reference implementations available when the Standard is published as a final recommendation.

The development of tools needs to be flexible enough to be able to be adapted in parallel with the evolving modules as those modules are put together to build the Standard.

Funding Issues

Funding the development and documentation of a standard is difficult; whereas, funding reference implementations and software development is much easier.

Mod Squad:

Note: The Mod Squad had their first meeting in Princeton in July 2007 with the goal of startng the modularization work which was first suggested back in the February Copenhagen F2F meeting. They met again in London at the FTF and in Princeton in January 2008. Participants have included Dominic, Julien, James, Marisa, and Markus.