Agenda for November 29, 2017 ALTO board teleconference.

  1. Find and tell a non-offensive, maybe self-deprecating joke before the meeting begins and/or after it ends. [All]
  2. Introduce new ALTO board member, Ralph Marschall, National Library of Luxembourg. [Frederick and Ralph]
  3. Renew ALTO board memberships. Frederick, Nate, and Siang Hock's membership terms expire on Dec 31 2017. Frederick, Nate, and Siang Hock must say if they will continue as board members. If they do continue, the other board members must approve. [Frederick leads discussion].
  4. Choose a board chair. Each year on or before Dec 31, the board must choose a chair from amongst its members for the following year (see board rules). All (continuing) members are elegible. [Someone besides Frederick (current chair) leads the discussion].
  5. Review action items. [Frederick leads discussion]
  6. Report on ALTO version 4.0, the ALTO XML schema README, and its CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. [Joachim, Evelien, Clemens, and Stefan lead discussion.]
  7. Report on examples of text direction for Asian languages issue 4. [Raju leads discussion.]
  8. Report on issue 32. [Art leads discussion.]
  9. Report on registration of MIME type for ALTO. See issue 40. [Jean Philippe and Frederick lead discussion.]
  10. Report on ALTO reference examples; see issue 1. [Stefan leads discussion.]
  11. Report on progress with processing history change requests. See issue 39. [Clemens leads discussion]
  12. Report (if needed) on integration of ALTO with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) isssue 45. [Jean Philippe and Clemens lead discussion]

View all open action items here.

Attending members

Minutes

New board member Ralph Marschall, National Library of Luxembourg welcomed. Ralph responds that he is happy to join the board and is responsible for digital projects at the Library.

Nate Trail and Frederick, whose terms expire 31 December 2017, affirmed that they will continue as ALTO board member. Siang Hock will not continue as a board member.

Introductory jokes are not recorded :-)

Clemens leads the board in selecting a new board chair. Frederick says that he will act as board chair for another year (2018) but will step down as board chair. No one else volunteers to serve as board chair, but Jukka, Stefan, Jean-Phillipe, and Art should also be asked their interest in becoming board chair. Clemens volunteers to ask Jukka, Stefan, Jean-Phillipe, and Art. A genda item 4 to be carried over to the next board meeting.

wrt to agenda Raju added an example of a right-to-left language to the github repository for reference examples. Clemens has added examples from the Berlin library, too. Ashok will upload out-of-copyright images for Google's stock of images for OCR test, Cherokee, East Asian languages with text left to right and up to down. Google has document (book, etc) images as well as "seen" text. Clemens reports that the Berlin library has Turkish language in Arabic script and Church Slavonic.

Clemens and Raju agree that a repository for these reference images; Clemens will create the repository. Frederick mentions that such a repository might be useful for the ICDAR competitions. Clemens says that IAPR Technical Committee 10 might also be interested in these images, too. Clemens will get in touch with IAPR to find out what is needed to register a data set in TC-11.

Agenda item 9: rederick reports that neither he nor Jean-Phillipe have finished submission of ALTO as a MIME type to IETF as a RFC.

Agenda item 6: Evelien reports that Joachim, Stefan, and Clemens agreed to review the README and the changes for ALTO schema 4.0 but have not yet done so. Evelien will remind them to do this before the next board meeting. Evelien says that she will update the README for the new release too.

Raju reports briefly on agenda item 7, examples of text direction for Asian languages. He explains that both board and non-board members should contribute to it. Clemens explains that non-board members - github registered users but without write priveleges to the ALTO repository - contribute to the image repository by forking the repository. Clemens will add a short statement explaining this to a README for the repository. Clemens asks for names for the repository. Ashok suggests that the name of the repository should capture the mission of ALTO, namely, to capture OCR text in all its forms, for widely spoken and narrowly spoken, and little used languages.

Ashok reports that Google now gives attention to text in videos and asks if ALTO should also be capable of representing text from videos. Clemens says that ALTO should be capable of doing this and is of the opinion that such capabilities are within the scope of the ALTO board. Ashok says Google captures text via OCR from videos now and wants some external format in which to put the results. Ashok will upload an out-of-copyright video (mp4) to the aforementioned repository that Clemens will create.