[MEI-L] Report of the Council Meeting 2011

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear list-members,

although many of you have been part of this, we believe that a detailed report on this year's Council meeting is of interest for the whole community. I'm very sorry for the long delay – we've been busy disseminating MEI on several conferences, a summer school etc. I you think we've missed anything, or in case you have other questions regarding the meeting, feel free to comment on this. 

On behalf of the Charlottesville / Detmold Team,
Johannes Kepper

------------

Report of the annual meeting of the MEI Council and the Technical Team Meeting in Detmold, 18–21 July 2011

This year´s annual meeting of the MEI Council was a virtual conference held on 18 and 19 July 2011. Participants were Richard Freedman, Axel Teich Geertinger, Erin Mayhood, Daniel Pitti, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Christine Siegert and Frans Wiering. At the same time, the so-called Technical Team and other participants from Detmold (Benjamin W. Bohl, Julian Dabbert, Maja Hartwig, Johannes Kepper, Laurent Pugin, Kristina Richts, Perry Roland, Daniel Röwenstrunk, Craig Stuart Sapp, Joachim Veit and Raffaele Viglianti) met in Detmold for this conference. They were joined by Thomas Weber, developer of a MEI-based SVG-renderer for CMN, and Ichiro Fujinaga and Andrew Hankinson from McGill University.

The agenda of the meeting included short updates on recent developments in MEI-related projects, discussion of organizational issues, and a status report on preparations for the next release of the schema.

The project updates were given by Andrew Hankinson (use of MEI for an online version of the Liber usualis), Christine Siegert (issues of encoding canons in MEI), Raffaele Viglianti (combining MEI and TEI for source transcriptions), Richard Freedman (update on the Du Chemin project), Craig Sapp (transformation from MEI to SCORE) and Julian Dabbert (update on the MEI Score Editor). The presentations demonstrated a wide range of possible use cases for MEI and showed the success of MEI's dissemination efforts.

Afterwards, a number of significant changes to the schema proposed for the next release were presented and discussed under the guidance of the Technical Team. Although many of the changes discussed will break compatibility between the current 2010-05 release and its successor, the participants consented that they are useful contributions to MEI and should be adopted sooner rather than later. Changes to the schema, especially “non-conforming” ones, will be documented and a program to make MEI files encoded using the 2010 release valid against the next release will be provided.

In the last part of the virtual meeting, the current structure of the MEI Council was discussed. It was generally agreed to stay with the current model and to accept new members by consent of the current membership. At this point, all participants that were not officially enrolled were welcomed as new Council members. Likewise, the Technical Team was commissioned to select its members on its own. The project website at http://music-encoding.org will reflect current memberships as soon as possible. Another organizational issue was the possibility of joining forces with other organizations, such as the International Association of Music Libraries (IAML). Although this would offer benefits such as annual meetings, membership and financial services, etc., it was agreed that MEI should remain independent for the time being. Further discussion on these issues was deferred to a scheduled face-to-face meeting in 2013 at the end of the current DFG/NEH grant.

After the virtual meeting, the Technical Team met for two more days to work on important details of the next release of MEI. In addition to other topics such as treatment of ossias, figured bass, etc., the two most important issues were the creation of MEI Guidelines and a set of tools called MEIron.

Whereas the Schema and Tag Library address the needs of developers, corresponding documentation focused on the needs of scholars / encoders is still missing. This gap will be filled by the MEI Guidelines, which will be structured following the current module structure of the schema. It is envisioned that this document will cover the complete specification of MEI, and will combine verbal descriptions with examples of how to use certain features. It was consented that the Guidelines should be written collaboratively following instructions given by Perry Roland and Johannes Kepper. First assignments to specific chapters have been made already, but the size of this project requires voluntary support of Council members and non-members alike. It is currently planned to offer a first, albeit incomplete version of the Guidelines together with the next release of MEI.

The other main topic of the Technical Team meeting was the preparation for a toolset called MEIron. This toolset will serve different purposes. First, it will offer a way to “flatten out” (hence the name) multiple reading paths in MEI files, which is a technical requirement for many use cases of MEI files (conversion to other formats, rendering etc.), even though this alteration is “lossy”. Since few, if any, other formats offer the capability of capturing alternative paths at the same level as MEI, nearly all developers of transforming applications must implement some form of this “reduction”. By providing MEIron, we hope to relieve developers of the burden of creating code for this procedure for every new transformation target and to standardize the transformation itself. Second, since MEI allows one to encode certain features in multiple ways, e.g., ties can be encoded as attributes on notes or as separate elements that refer to notes either by timestamp or by pointing to IDs, MEIron will provide a method for creating “canonical” encodings. This will allow applications to support only one of the encoding alternatives for a given feature. MEIron will be parameterized to allow selection of the appropriate alternative for the application.

The Technical Team does not currently have the resources to develop such a tool as a stand-alone application. Instead, it is planned to offer the MEIron as a set of XSLT files that serve as model for implementations. All implementations will then have to conform to the transformation exemplified in the Council's XSLT. Several components offering parts of this are already in use; the Technical Team will collect and review these components, will embed them in a plan for further developments and make everything accessible on the website.

Also, it was agreed that the Technical Team should meet quarterly using the virtual meeting software provided by UVa. The next meeting is scheduled for the late October / early November 2011.