Agenda for September 1, 2016 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. Clarify terms of use for ALTO (see issue 37). Nate reports on whether the Library of Congress will approve the ALTO board's choice of Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). [Frederick leads discussion]
  3. Three board member terms expire at the end of 2016, Evelien, Joachim, and Jukka. According to ALTO Board Membership rules board membership terms are renewable. [Evelien, Joachim, and Jukka lead discussion]
  4. According to ALTO Board Membership rules a chair must be chosen for the next calendar year (2017) on or before Dec 31 of the current calendar year (2016). Volunteers? [Frederick leads discussion]
  5. Discuss collaboration with the Newspapers Interest Group of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and with the IFLA News Media section on an ALTO fragment identifier API. [Frederick leads discussion]
  6. Review comments on Glyphs change request (issue 26) with view to changing its state to voting. [Joachim leads discussion.]
  7. Discuss processing history change requests. See issue 39. [Clemens leads discussion]
  8. Continue discussion of ALTO fragment idenfitifier API (issue 33) and IIIF's change request (issue 40). [Jean Philippe leads discussion.]

View all open action items here.

Attending members

Minutes

New action item: Collaboration with IIIF and IFLA News Media section on newspapers (28) added by Frederick as a result of conversations with Karen Estlund (Pennsylvania State University) and Peter Binkley (University of Alberta). The Newspaper Interest group of IIIF is especially interested in collaboration with the ALTO board.

Wrt to issue 23 : Stefan said that recruiting someone from Google to become an ALTO board member has not been particularly successful; he contacted Ray Smith and another fellow (name not known), both from Google, whilst he was at the 2016 Document Analysis Systems conference; neither were especially interested in becoming a member. Stefan said that he would try recruiting someone from ABBYY. Jukka has not gotten a reply from Sweden about ALTO board membership issue 22; he closed the issue.

Frederick asked if issue 4 should be closed, Raju asked that it be left open, at least until the next board meeting.

In order to better understand why an issue was closed, Clemens suggested adding comments to the issue when it is closed. Everyone attending concured.

Discussion about licenses and use rights for the ALTO schema (continued from the last board meeting): Nate reports that the Library of Congress does not use CC Atrribution 4.0 International, mostly because the legal folks at the Library focus on use within the USA. Nate believes that the standards administered by the Library are public domain (CC0). Nate says that since ALTO is not a standard the the Library of Congress has developed but is merely hosting, there may be an argument for licensing the ALTO as we see fit (CC Attribution 4.2 Internation). Clemens had scheduled a meeting with Armin Talke, legal expert for copyright and other matters, at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; the meeting was postponed because of illness. Licenses will again be discussed at the next board meeting.

Frederick reminds Jukka that his term is expiring at the end of this year (2016); Jukka plans to renew his board membership. Frederick will remind Evelien and Joachim that their terms are expiring, too.

Short discussion about collaboration with IIIF and its API for images and image fragments. Jean Philippe spoke with the BnF's IIIF member. Clemens said that he had a 2 day meeting with Karen Estlund and Glen Robson (Chair of the IIIF Newspaper Interest Group). Clemens said that the IIIF just released its Presentation API. The functionality described by Jean Philippe in issue 33 is already accomodated by the IIIF Presentation API. IIIF is interested in a standard representation of OCR text and images for the IIIF Presentation API. The IIIF Newspapers Interest Group has teleconference meetings from time to time; the meetings are open -- anyone can attend, all that's needed is an interest.

Jean Philippe asks about the case where an organization would like to use an ALTO API without using the IIIF API. He is particularly keen to collaborate with IIIF on this.

Frederick suggests that a smaller group call focused on the ALTO fragment identifier API, issue 33, would accomplish more. Jean Philippe agrees to organize the call.

Clemens leads a discussion about issue 39, processing history. He reports on the results of a discussion during a small group call focused specifically on issue 39. Jukka, Raju, Evelien, Joachim, Stefan, and Clemens participated in the call. Notes from the call are found in issue 39 comments. There are a number of follow-up items from the call which the call participants agreed to do (Clemens will follow up). Clemens says that a follow up call is planned. He guesses that there will be something substantive from the small group calls about processing history to discuss in the board meeting after the next board meeting (2 board meetings hence). He will assign some actions to the participants in the small group call.

The status of the Glyphs change request (issue 26) is "voting". Clemens wants to test the changes resulting from (issue 26) before he votes and suggests there is no urgency to publish ALTO version 3.2. Frederick says that one other reason we are waiting to publish version 3.2 is to publish it with the new use terms. So there's no hurry to publish a new schema.

Next board meeting will be Oct 27 at the usual times.