Agenda for April 24, 2014 ALTO board teleconference. If you have changes or additions, please email them to everyone as soon as possible.

1. Review action items [Frederick leads discussion]
2. Review comments received (if any) about draft schema version 2.1. [Everyone]
3. ALTO poster at IFLA WLIC Aug 18-19 in Lyon France. [Jean Philippe and Frederick lead discussion]
4. ALTO dialects discussion (cf. BNF_proposal) [Jean Philippe leads discussion]
5. ALTO editorial board face-to-face meeting: Where will it be? At the DLF Forum in Atlanta, Georgia (Oct 27-29)? Or at the JCDL/TPDL Joint Conference in London (Sep 8-12)? [Frederick leads discussion]
6. Review migration from PBWorks to Github. [Frederick leads discussion]
7. Reminder to send URLs to digital collections which use ALTO XML to Nate so that he can update the ALTO use case examples at http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/community/implementers.php [Frederick harangues everyone]

Action items

• [Action 2014-04-24] Jean Philippe will create a branch of the v2.1 ALTO schema on Github. The branch will be used to implement the needed named types for ALTO dialects in schema v2.2.
• [Action 2014-04-24] Jean Philippe will draft a design for the ALTO poster at WLIC 2014.
• [Action 2014-04-24] Jukka will create a short document showing how to migrate open change proposals from PBWorks to Github.
• [Action 2014-02-20] Everyone will copy the open proposal that they champion from PBworks to Github. The open proposals will become "issues" in Github.
• [Action 2013-12-12] Brian will create text for an ALTO tools and software webpage.
• [Action 2013-11-03] Frederick will try to recruit a board member from an OCR software development team, perhaps Tesseract.
• [Action 2013-11-03] Frederick will try to recruit a board member from an Asian language country.
• [Action 2013-09-19] Everyone to send ALTO use cases to Nate. Nate will add new use cases to the ALTO implementers webpage.
• [Action 2013-04-11] Frederick will draft a change proposal for "normalized" coordinates.

Attending members

• Brian Geiger
• Evelien Ket
• Frederick Zarndt
• Jukka Kervinen
• Nate Trail
• Kia Siang Hock

Minutes

No one has heard comments regarding the v2.1 schema.

Evelien remarks that Europeana Newspapers has already implemented v2.1 tags for 'named entities': On the Github page of the named entity recognition tool of europeana newspapers you can see that they have implemented ALTO 2.1 as an output format (see http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/named-entity-recognition-for-digitised-newspapers/ and https://github.com/KBNLresearch/europeananp-ner

Frederick reminds everyone to migrate the open proposals which they champion from PBWorks to Github.

Jean Philippe leads a discussion about ALTO dialects which may facilitate the adoption of standard ALTO by libraries (see his presentation http://altostandard.pbworks.com/w/file/78594842/ALTO-dialects.pptm). He has already experimented with the ALTO dialect mechanism using BnF data. Jean Philippe recommends adoption of ALTO dialects. He suggests that we must advise ALTO users that a dialect restricting the ALTO schema still maintains compatibility with the standard ALTO schema but that a dialect extending the ALTO schema will not be compatible with the standard ALTO schema. Using the dialect mechanism also obviates the need for local, bespoke copies of the ALTO schema.

Nate remarks that dialects are a good way to test new ALTO features. He suggests dialects are really a best practice document. Jean Philippe says that this is true but some named types must be added to the schema; the schema with the named types will be functionally equivalent to current schema and will be a better design.

Jean Philippe will add the needed named types to the schema. The changed schema must be tested with both ALTO production and presentation software. Jukka suggests that this should be the only change for the next release.

BnF would like to have a new ALTO schema incorporating the needed named types in summer because it is about to begin a major digitization project.

Brief discussion about the ALTO poster for WLIC 2014. Jean Philippe will draft a design the poster. Frederick asks who plans to attend WLIC 2014.

Discussion of the next face-to-face ALTO board meeting. Frederick will inquire about a face-to-face meeting room at both WLIC 2014 (Lyon) and JCDL/TPDL 2014 (London). Five ALTO board members will attend WLIC 2014. At least 3 board members will attend JCDL/TPDL 2014 for the METS board meeting. Maybe 3 ALTO board members may attend DLF (Atlanta). Best face-to-face meeting place is Lyon, followed by London, with DLF a distant 3rd.

Jukka volunteers to create documentation showing how to migrate open proposals from PBWorks to Github.

Brian is submitting a grant proposal about newspapers digitization outside of NDNP. Reskarta has come up a number of times; he suggests that the ALTO should investigate Reskarta.