CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_



Reported by Peter Kirstein/UCL

ODA Minutes

Agenda


   o Introduction of Participants.
   o Discussion of Charter.
   o Review of Documentation available.
   o Consideration of current status of standardisation.
   o Review of facilities needed for IETF-ODA Pilots.
   o Review of possible products.
   o Discussion of interaction with message systems.
   o Discussion of interaction with other working groups.
   o Review of possible programme and timetable.
   o Proposed further actions.
   o Methods of Working.
   o Arrangements for future Meetings.


The attendees outlined their interests in the Working Group.  Most were
interested to use facilities provided to them; few were interested in
developing facilities themselves.  There was interest in the
functionality of ODA, therefore a tutorial by Frank Held was organised
as an evening session; it was attended by about 25 people.

The group agreed that they would like to use existing software - but
needed to know what was available.

The Chair outlined the capabilities of ODA; it would enable the
interchange of documents with various text capabilities (including
Fonts), geometric graphics and bit-map graphics.  It would allow,
therefore, interchange of processable documents between different word
processors.  The bit-map graphics supported both Group 3 and Group 4
facsimile formats - potentially of interest to the NETFAX Group.  The
standard is very general.  To ensure the capability of document
interchange, it is essential to define also a Document Application
Profile (DAP), to which any product must conform.  A particular DAP has
been developed in Europe under the PODA project, and a number of
products exist to this DAP (Q112,[1]).  The Chair stated that software
will be available to allow documents preparation and storage, and also
document interchange to the DAP. He had identified three products which
would support ODA from the beginning at the 3rd quarter of 1991:  the
SLATE editor from BBN (with UCL additions), a product from Xerox, and

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various DEC products for CDA. A version of WORD from Honeywell-Bull, and
of WordPerfect from ICL would probably exist, and other products could
be available by the summer.  It was proposed, and agreed, that the group
will try to get started as soon as possible on a pilot activity.  The
members of the group would want to experiment with the facilities
themselves; if they were satisfactory, they could try to get other user
groups interested.

For a User Pilot, it was necessary to have not only an editor which
could produce an ODA stream (ODIF), but also combine it with a mail
system.  The ODIF stream contained arbitrary 8 bit binary; therefore it
could not be sent by RFC 822 mail without modification.  Luckily the
SMTPEXT group were proposing both a short-term and longer term
recommendation for the extension of that system to support binary data.
Another mail system (X.400) was the brief of the OSIX.400 Working Group;
that system also supported binary data.  It was agreed that the present
Working Group make known its needs to, and use the mail systems defined
by, the other two Working Groups.  We need not consider mail further
inside the present Working Group - except to make recommendations based
on the actions received from the other groups.  Some of the products of
interest with the ODA capability (WORD, WordPerfect) existed currently
only for PCs.  The WG participants felt that they were already making
adequate ad-hoc arrangements to incorporate documents from PCs into mail
systems, and did not need - or want - the Working Group to address the
mechanisms needed.

In accordance with the Charter, the Chair promised to provide further
details of product availability before the end of April.  By that time,
the interim recommendation of the SMTPEXT Working Group should be
available.  The aim was still that sufficient information should be
available by that time, that an initial set of trials by participants
should be possible between the lst and 2nd quarters of 1991, and that a
detailed plan for a PILOT should be ready for the next IETF meeting in
Atlanta.

It was not thought necessary to have a further meeting prior to the next
IETF, but a meeting during that week was planned.

A set of documents relating to ODA had been put in an archive - further
documents will be added to this database as they become available.

Reference


  1. EWOS: ODA Document Application Profile Q112 - Processable and
     formatted documents - Extended mixed mode, PrENV 41 510, Paris,
     1988.



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Attendees

Richard Bowles           bowles@stsci.edu
Ross Callon              callon@bigfut.enet.dec.com
David Crocker            david_crocker@palo-alto.pa.dec.com
Shari Galitzer           shari@gateway.mitre.org
Russ Hobby               rdhobby@ucdavis.edu
Darren Kinley            kinley@crim.ca
Peter Kirstein           kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Jim Knowles              jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov
Vincent Lau              vlau@sun.com
David Miller             dtm@ulana.mitre.org
Robert Morgan            morgan@jessica.stanford.edu
Robert Reschly           reschly@brl.mil
George Sanderson         sanderson@mdc.com
Mark Sherman             mss+@andrew.cmu.edu
Gregory Vaudreuil        gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us
John Veizades            veizades@apple.com
Wengyik Yeong            yeongw@psi.com



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