Minutes of the Technical Standing Committee

2018-12-30 Announced the first public draft of the ELF Dates standard for public review.

2018-12-13 Held a long TSC meeting by Google Hangout during which we reviewed the entire ELF Dates document and resolved all the outstanding issues. We will aim to release this as a first public draft over the Christmas period.

2018-08-26 Decided to move the definitions of the date and age microformat from ELF Serialisation to a new ELF Date Microformats document. This is consistent with what we’ve done with complex microformats elsewhere, for example the pattern datatype and the creator’s name microformat.

2018-07-25 Completed a major rewrite of the ELF Serialisation and ELF Data Model drafts.

2018-06-05 Held a very productive TSC meeting by Google Hangout to discuss the details of the ELF Serialisation. In particular, it was agreed:

• to replace the previous namespace-based extensibility mechanism with one based on schemas, allowing context-specific tag to IRI mappings, and also allowing basic validation of the structure of an ELF file;
• that discovery information of the sort that can be found via Triples Discovery should be allowed in an ELF schema;
• to extend the use of the LANG tag to allow any data to be language-tagged using either an RFC 4646 language tag or a legacy GEDCOM language string which will be inherited by child ELF structures;
• for future compatibility, we would add a piece of discovery metadata to allow a vocabulary author to indicate that a tag changes the meaning of its enclosing structure sufficiently that the application should discard structure if it does not fully understand the tag;
• that it would likely be necessary to allow external schemas, but that this feature would not be included in the first public draft, nor would the related issues of inter-document pointers and container formats;
• that ELF bindings (such as those for CEV) might need a selector syntax for defining a property (e.g. a citation element) in terms of non-local content, but that this would be deferred until after the first public draft of ELF; and
• that increasing there were indications that list-valued properties would be needed in Basic Concepts which would cause major and maybe insurmountable difficulties in Triples Discovery, but that this did not need addressing during the work on the first ELF drafts.

2018-06-01 Noted with interest Tamura Jones’ Annotated Edition of GEDCOM 5.5.1.

2018-04-24 Agreed with the Board that ELF was our next technical priority; it will largely take precedence over work on the CEV GEDCOM X bindings and further development of the CEV Vocabulary. Noted that recent discussion favoured replacing the extensibility mechanism in the current ELF Serialisation draft (which was based on CFPS 37) with an idea we’re calling schemas (which is loosely based on the now-defunct GEDCOM 5.3 feature). This continues to map ELF tags to IRIs, but allows the mapping to depend on the context in which the tag is used.

2018-03-16 Announced first public drafts of Basic Concepts, Triples Discovery and Patterns; and third public drafts of CEV Concepts and the CEV RDFa Bindings. These new CEV drafts included no major changes to the data model.

2018-03-15 Following a major rework of the Patterns draft, agreed to include it in the current batch of drafts.

2018-03-13 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout during which we ran through the remaining list of issues with our working drafts. Agreed to move our regular expression dialect to a separate draft called Patterns as it was a large, logically separate component that risked delaying the of release our other drafts. We hoped to release public drafts of the other four standards later in the week.

2018-02-07 Held a useful discussion session on how the CEV GEDCOM X bindings might work which resulted in a broad consensus, however we will not be including these in our next batch of public drafts.

2018-02-04 Implemented our proposed Triples Discovery mechanism for terms currently defined in the draft standards on the terms.fhiso.org webserver.

2018-01-30 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout at which we identified the outstanding issues which need fixing in the four current drafts before we release them publicly. There was also a productive discussion on how the CEV ELF bindings might work.

2017-12-12 The TSC reported to the Board that the next batch of public drafts was still some way off due to unforeseen complexities with the ELF Serialisation extensibility mechanism. It was agreed that the TSC should aim to release public drafts in late January of the Basic Concepts, Triples Discovery, CEV Concepts and (if there are enough changes to warrant its inclusion) CEV RDFa Bindings standards which have seen significant development since the last round of public drafts in September.

2017-10-31 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout during which we discussed details of the extensibility mechanism for ELF Serialisation and the patterns used for datatypes in Basic Concepts.

2017-09-12 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout to discuss our next priorities. It was agreed:

• that we would prioritise ELF over GEDCOM X, with the aim of including first public drafts of ELF Serialisation and ELF Data Model in the next batch of standards to be released;
• that we would produce a low-level standard called Basic Concepts refactoring material on strings, characters and terms from Citation Elements: General Concepts, and including further material from our vocabularies policy;
• that we would explore the possibility of a lightweight discovery mechanism using Canonical N-Triples accessed over HTTP; and
• that we define a regular expression dialect for use in datatype patterns.

2017-09-11 Announced second public drafts of the Citation Elements: General Concepts and Citation Elements: RDFa bindings standards for public review. Major changes included:

• removing the notion of a layer identifier and defer consideration of metadata support for the time being;
• changing all our http: IRIs to https: due to security and privacy concerns; and
• expanding the notion of a translation set into a more general localisation set to allow a combination of structured and unstructured values.

2017-07-10 Approved the folowing classes of document as suitable to be referenced normatively by FHISO standards:

• any other FHISO standard;
• any ISO standard;
• any IETF RFC that is categorised as Standards Track or Best Current Practice;
• any W3C recommendation;
• the Unicode Standard, including any Unicode Standard Annex;
• the US ASCII standard (ANSI X3.4-1986); and
• the withdrawn ANSEL standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993), for the purposes of our ELF standards only.

2017-07-04 Agreed that we would not continuously edit the drafts on the website, but will batch up changes and issue revised drafts from time to time.

2017-06-29 Announced first public drafts of the Citation Elements: General Concepts and Citation Elements: RDFa bindings standards for public review.

2017-06-29 Agreed in discussion with the Board that standards and draft standards will have stable URLs beginning http://fhiso.org/TR/, and configured the webservers accordingly.

2017-06-13 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout. Discussion focused on certain details of the ELF Serialization draft, which now includes an extensibility mechanism. It was agreed:

• that the order of tags should not be significant except where GEDCOM attaches significance to them so that a GEDCOM parser can read, edit and write ELF;
• that we should have a consistent definition of a string throughout our standards;
• that applications must be flexible about whitespace when reading ELF, but strict when writing it;
• that there should be a general escape mechanism for escaping characters in ELF; and
• that payloads must not be whitespace normalised at the serialisation layer.

2017-06-13 Noted from the 13 June Board meeting:

• that the Board agrees it is not necessary to announce formally the creation of the Technical Project Team;
• that the TSC should release first drafts of standards for public comment as and when they became ready, rather than waiting and releasing a large batch all together.

2017-06-08 Approved vocabularies policy as a FHISO technical policy, and an updated priorities document as a non-binding indication of the TSC’s current direction. Also approved the creation of a Technical Project Team as a formal means of allowing the current exploratory work to continue into the project development phase in a “committee of the whole”.

2017-05-29 Noted that Luther had produced first exploratory drafts of an ELF: Serialization Format and ELF: Data Model. These did not currently include an extensibility mechanism.

2017-05-25 Noted that Richard had produced a first exploratory draft of a Citation Elements: General Concepts and Basic Framework standard, and had closed the dev-2017-01 branch. The draft does not currently support layered citations.

2017-05-22 Noted that Richard had produced a first exploratory draft of a Citation Elements: RDFa bindings standard.

2017-05-19 Noted that Richard had made available a first exploratory draft of a Citation Elements: GEDCOM X bindings standard. Further work is required before becoming a public draft as this draft is based on an earlier version of the data model without translation sets.

2017-05-17 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout. During a productive conversation about the serialisation of citation elements it was recognised that users may be reluctant to discard formatted citation in favour of citation element sets due to the work that goes into producing professional formatted citations. Could we allow elements to be tagged in a formatted citation? It was agreed to explore the use of RDFa attributes in HTML as a possible means of doing this.

2017-03-16 Noted from the 16 March Board meeting that it was agreed that standards produced by FHISO would be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

2017-02-16 Held a TSC meeting by Google Hangout.

• Agreed that the scope of our initial ELF standards should be limited to clarifying ambiguities in GEDCOM, codifying current practice, updating its presentation, and adding an extension mechanism; other extensions and changes would be out of scope.
• Agreed that the ELF spec should be split in two with the abstract syntax and the genealogical tag list being separate standards.
• Noted that Richard had made some progress on citation elements on the dev-2017-01 branch in Github, and had introduced the concept of a translation set to resolve problems in the data model with citation elements that were both translatable and multi-valued.

2017-01-31 Noted that Luther than produced a first exploratory draft of an ELF standard.

2016-12-27 Identified our current technical priorities to be:

1. a core citation element vocabulary (CEV) standard;
2. a less technical primer or overview to the CEV and its bindings;
3. CEV bindings for GEDCOM X;
4. CEV bindings for ELF; and
5. an ELF extensibility mechanism.

2016-12-26 Proposed that FHISO develop a serialisation format that is backwards compatibility with current GEDCOM, but that supports an extensibility mechanism that would prevent different vendors’ extensions from conflicting. After informal discussion with the Board, the working name ELF (Extended Legacy Format) has been chosen for this work to avoid any intellectual property issues that might arise by calling it a version of GEDCOM.

2016-12-15 Instigated discussion with the Board regarding the how FHISO’s present proposed technical work would fit into the wider genealogical ecosystem, and why vendors might choose to adopt our work.

2016-11-11 Held a phone meeting to try to kick-start development again, and to remind ourselves where we had reached.

2016-05-09 Announced a first exploratory draft of the introduction to the Citation Element Vocabulary standard, giving details of the data model.

2016-04-19 Proposed and had passed a motion at the Board Meeting to add by-laws material regarding the ratification of standards (which was previously in the O&PM but should not be within the scope of the TSC to change).

2016-04-19 Proposed and had passed a motion at the Board Meeting to remove reference to details of technical governance, such as the O&PM and Project Teams.

2016-03-22 Suspended the S&CEG in order to focus on our priorities in a “committee of the whole” per our interim governance structure.

2016-02-17 Announced our interim governance structure which will apply as we work towards our new priorities.

2016-02-16 Approved our priorities and technical strategy documents as non-binding statements of TSC guidance. Approved vocabularies policy as a draft for wider comment on tsc-public.

2016-01-19 Presented our draft priorities, technical strategy, and vocabularies policy at the 19 January Board meeting, where it was agreed that we should make any final changes and release them to tsc-public for further discussion.

2016-01-07 Produced a short draft document listing our immediate priorities, and a longer draft technical strategy paper.

2015-12-07 Published a draft policy on the prefered use of vocabularies, and amended the style guide to say that “FHISO standards will normally be made available in both HTML and PDF formats”.

2015-11-27 Noted that the 27 November Board meeting, in consultation with the TSC, recommended:

• that the TSC should produce a short high-level strategy paper;
• that technical work should focus on narrow citations standards covering vocabularies for textual citation elements and, less pressingly, describing source derivation;
• that the TSC should draft a general policy on the preferred nature of vocabularies, such as the use of URIs; and
• that these TSC minutes should be made public.

2015-11-22 Deployed the new technical website.

2015-11-21 Thanked the Board for approving the updated Operations & Policy Manual.

2015-11-20 Proposed some minor modifications to the Operations & Policy Manual to the Board for approval.

2015-08-21 Produced the first draft of a new technical website for the TSC, automatically updating its content from Github repositories.

2015-08-17 Suggested to the S&CEG that FHISO’s general policy should be to use URIs as metadata identifiers.

2015-06-19 Suspended the CCEG in order to prioritise the work of the S&CEG; the CCEG mailing list had been silent for three months, they have no Coordinator, and none of its members have been active recently.

2015-06-15 Reported to the S&CEG on a possible opportunity to work with FamilySearch on a representation of source metadata.

2015-04-10 Announced the creation of the Sources & Citations EG, and approved their directives.

2015-02-27 Accepted with regret the resignation of Justin York to be Coordinator of the CCEG. Without a Coordinator or any active members, the CCEG is effectively dormant.

2015-01-14 Appointed Sue Adams to be Coordinator of the Sources & Citations EG.

2015-01-14 Agreed on a suggested prioritisation of CCEG work.

2015-01-06 Noted that the Board, in consultation with the TSC, have recommended the prioritisation of three areas of technical work:

1. further standardisation of GEDCOM and/or GEDCOM-X;
2. a new sources and citations standard;
3. a new research transfer format.

2014-11-26 Noted a commitment from Nick Hall to work on the Sources & Citations EG.

2014-10-16 Resolved that the collection of use cases and user stories and the recommendation of functional requirements in a particular subject area shall ordinarily be considered exploratory work, per section 1.2 of the Operations & Policy Manual, and conducted by the specific technical group or groups tasked with work in that area.

2014-10-08 Noted a commitment from Diane Rogers to work on the Sources & Citations EG.

2014-10-08 Noted a commitment from Richard Tallent to work on the Core Concepts EG as an associate member.

2014-10-08 Noted a commitment from Richard Tallent to work on the Sources & Citations EG as an associate member.

2014-10-04 Announced the creation of the Lexicon EG and the informal FHISO bibliography.

2014-10-02 Approved the LexEG’s directives.

2014-09-30 Appointed Tony Proctor to be Coordinator of the LexEG

2014-09-26 Produced draft directives for review by the initial LexEG members.

2014-09-25 Noted a commitment from Elizabeth Shown Mills to work on the Lexicon EG.

2014-09-23 Announced the creation of the Core Concepts EG, and approved its directives.

2014-09-20 Noted a commitment from Jan Murphy to work on the CCEG.

2014-09-16 Approved a proposal by Tony Proctor to start an informal FHISO bibliography and appointed Tony its editor.

2014-09-16 Selected GitHub as our preferred collaboration platform for producing technical documents on the recommendation of the CCEG Coordinator.

2014-09-12 Appointed Justin York to be Coordinator of the CCEG.

2014-09-09 Noted a commitment from Constance Horne to work on the CCEG as an associate member.

2014-09-09 Produced a policy on document formats produced by EGs.

2014-09-08 Noted the resignation of Thomas Wetmore from the CCEG.

2014-09-05 Produced guidelines on the use of the tsc-public list.

2014-09-01 Produced draft directives for review by the initial CCEG members.

2014-08-29 Noted a commitment from John Tracy Cunningham to work on the Lexicon EG.

2014-08-28 Thanked the Board for approving the Operations & Policy Manual with minor changes, and made it public on the website.

2014-08-26 Accepted and announced a proposal from Tony Proctor for a Lexicon EG.

2014-08-26 Noted a commitment from Thomas Wetmore to work on the Core Concepts EG.

2014-08-26 Submitted the Operations & Policy Manual to the Board for approval.

2014-08-26 Noted a commitment from Sue Adams to work on the Sources & Citations EG.

2014-08-25 Noted a commitment from Justin York to work on the Core Concepts EG.

2014-08-20 Resolved that CFPS papers need to be stand-alone documents, that any links or citations need to be supporting information but not the meat of the paper.

2014-08-16 Noted a proposal from Tony Proctor to split the Core Concepts EG in two, one part to produce a lexicon of terms, the other to determine the project scope. Suggested further discussion should occur on the tsc-public list.

2014-08-16 Noted a commitment from Nick Matthews to work on the Core Concepts EG.

2014-08-15 Announced the start of technical work.

2014-08-15 Proposed four initial exploratory groups: Core Concepts, Modularity, Data Formalism, and Sources & Citations

2014-08-15 Thanked the Board for approving the TSC Charter.