Agenda for May 4, 2017 ALTO board teleconference.
View all open action items here.
Attending members
Minutes
Board action items reviewed.
Frederick reports that Eric Weig has resigned from the ALTO board because of his workload. He mentions meeting Art Rhyno at the Reykjavik IFLA International News Media conference; Art has experience with Tesseract, has taught XML classes, and has helped build Our Digital World, a digital repository which includes newspapers. Art will send his resume to the board as a potential board member. Clemens contacted the University of Mannheim but reports that one of the 2 suitable ALTO board candidates there has moved to a new position and is not yet able to take up any new work while the second candidate left the University.
Frederick reports that Dresden has made arrangements for a face-to-face meeting (no details given). Clemens, Jean Philipe, (maybe) Joachim, (maybe) Evelien, and (maybe) Frederick will be at DATECH. Clemens will contact the DATECH organizers and ask for a room and a time for an ALTO board face-to-face meeting at DATECH. He will also email board members the meeting place and time. Clemens will check the DATECH registrations for IIIF members so that they can be invited to the board face-to-face meeting. Of the board members attending this teleconference, Clemens and Jean Philipe say that their organizations already use IIIF in some form. Other attending board members do not (yet) use it. Clemens remarks that IIIF has great momentum at present. (Frederick has since decided to attend DATECH.)
No board member will attend the IIIF meeting at Vatican. Jean Philip posted issue 33 about the IIIF collaboration. Jean Philip will open an new issue about the ALTO board collaboration with IIIF and close the existing ALTO fragment identifier issues. Jean Philip reports that he has worked with Glen Robson and Karen Estlund from the IIIF Newspapers Interest Group.
Publishing the glyphs change request (item 4 on the agenda) has been postponed until at least part of the processing history change request is ready to be published. The glyphs change request is approved by the board and otherwise ready to be published.
Clemens reports on a teleconference held at the end of March (Joachim, Jukka, Clements attending). During the teleconference, the attendees agreed to refinements for describing processing history. The refinements will break backward compatibility. Because of this, Clemens suggests that both the current processing history description and the new, refined method should exist simultaneously in the schema. An ID attribute will be required. The old method of describing processing history should be deprecated for the schema in which the new, refined processing history description is introduced.
During the teleconference it was decided that specific attributes for correction and verification will not be included but will instead be expressed by one of the processing step types. A common vocabulary for the processing history step types was proposed and made as generic as possible. The vocabulary has 5 different step types; the vocabulary is modeled after METS DMD IDs. Clemens has not yet been able to prepare a draft schema for the new, refined processing history. Clemens suggest that further discussion of the new processing history as well as discussion of the direction of it would be a good topic for a face-to-face meeting.
Frederick points out that board policy is that any schema change that breaks backward compatibility requires an increment to the schema major version. Thus the schema with the backward compatibility breaking changes for processing history must be 4.x (schema is currenty version 3.1). Clemens suggests that schema changes for the processing history changes be de-coupled from the glyph changes. The attending board members concur. A schema (version 3.2) with only the glyph changes will be released as soon as possible.
Joachim says that a change log and other documentation for schema version 3.2 must yet be prepared. Jukka, Joachim, and Clemens will prepare the version 3.2 schema, change log, and documentation; Nate will ensure that the new schema version will be posted also on the Library of Congress ALTO webpage.
Discussion moved to agenda item 8 in view of the decision to release schema version 3.2 as soon as possible. Clemens reported that Armin Talke, legal expert at Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin, agrees with the board's choice of Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Nate reported that legal counsel at the Library of Congress agrees as well because the schema is not a product of the Library.
The board agrees that a notice that the schema is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0) must be noted in the schema itself, on the ALTO Github repositories where appropriate, and on the Library of Congress ALTO webpage. The CC BY-SA 4.0) cannot be applied to previous schemas. Joachim will embed the CC BY-SA 4.0) notice in schema version 3.2.
Discussion moved to agenda item 6, registration of a MIME typ (application/xml+alto) for ALTO. Jean Philipe prepared a draft of an IETF RFC proposed a MIME type for ALTO; the draft awaits review by board members. Jean Philip put the draft in a shared Google gdoc for review by all board members.