Meeting report

Copied from e-mail sent by Twan on 2015-05-29

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Our plan is to make a fresh document with a skeleton borrowed from the structure of the ISO document. The first step then is to define the terminology, which we concluded needs to be a bit tighter than the current version. We will need to distinguish between things like CMDI attribute/XML attribute more strictly and consistently throughout the document to prevent ambiguity, and for example decide on a single good name for CMD instances (records) and define a common term for CMD elements and components.

The first section, the introduction, can probably be one of the last things to actually write. It would benefit from some diagrams, including a workflow and/or infrastructure component diagram. A short (version) history of CMDI would also be nice.

The next three sections, currently called ' Structure of CMDI-files', 'The CMDI Component Specification Language', and 'Transformation of CCSL into a schema' can remain intact on a structural level but will need to be mostly rewritten to reflect the implementation level more exactly. We have distributed the initial responsibility for these sections among three TF members (Oddrun, Thomas and myself respectively), each now 'owning' a section. This comes down to preparing the (sub)sections with stubs describing their intentions and then coordinating the work on the various subsection which hopefully can be further delegated to other enthusiastic volunteers :) We also think that the chapter names can be a bit more descriptive, although that probably is of lesser importance.

We are not sure whether appendices containing the full component schema and/or example documents should be kept. We could also simply reference the living document(s).

Finally, we believe that in terms of typography and writing style, the FCS specification can serve as an example very well. For example, we should specify things in terms of MUST, MAY, SHOULD NOT etc wherever possible.

Two non-TF members, Andrius Utka of Vytautas Magnus University and Amir Kamran of the Charles University in Prague have kindly offered to review (drafts of) the specification at a a later stage.

Thanks a lot everyone for their contributions today and before. Hopefully we can make good use of the momentum and keep working steadily towards a proper spec for CMDI.