Summary Working Group Chairs Meeting - June 6, 1997 At least one chair was present for each group, and presented a status report/overview of their group's process. The following are highlights from the discussions: Interoperability No date had yet been set for the first meeting. The feeling was that they would meet in Europe, possibly Zurich or London. The initial process consists of swapping bibliographies among working group members, establishing common ground. Their investigations will focus on "…approaches to interoperability that consider elements of digital libraries. For example, we are interested in documents an queries in various forms, and higher-level coordination mechanisms, such as negotiation over usage rights, price, and so forth." These areas encompass interoperability at various levels of abstraction, from mechanical transport issues to agent protocols. Metadata No date set for the first meeting. "This group will focus on defining key research issues in metadata and laying the groundwork for the development of specific metadata project proposals by subsets of the participants. The group's primary product is expected to be a report outlining the metadata research agenda as viewed by the participants." The group will emphasize metadata in use, within a rich context, and will therefore need close relationships with the other working groups, in particular the Resource Indexing and Discovery group. They would like to have adjacent meetings with this group during the second year. Intellectual Property and Economics This group will meet Aug. 27-29, 1997 in Pisa, Italy (preceding the European Digital Library Conference). The chairs are gathering citations for a bibliography, and creating the meeting agenda. The members come from various backgrounds, and will establish common ground through presentations and position papers. Resource Indexing and Discovery (formerly known and Search and Retrieval) This group will meet Nov. 3-4 (possibly also the 5th). They will begin by reviewing basic models of handling heterogeneous sources and consider basic issues, such as scalability, reliability, heterogeneity, quality of service. A literature review has been completed. Multilinguality Although not yet funded, plans are being made in the hopes that funds will be available in the fall. The first meeting would then be scheduled for late this year, in the U.S.. Five areas to be considered are Information Access, Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, Resources, Data Representation, Speech. Three questions to be asked are: What is basic research?, What is precompetitive?, What is commercializable?. The issue of target languages is also open. Funding Issues Following the group summaries, there was some discussion about the different funding pressures, policies, constraints on the European and U.S. members. On other financial news, there was a general consensus that the hosting chair for each meeting would arrange group meals and provide support for accommodation arrangements. Preparatory materials Within each working group, each member should submit a short position paper and a list of recent publications, and possibly a few suggested citations. These would then be circulated among the working group, and possibly placed on the main web site (probably in a private, password-protected area). Any citations for articles thought to be particularly useful for all members to read should be submitted to Jennifer (jperkins@umich.edu) for circulation. Jennifer's role Jennifer Perkins will function as an intellectual scribe for the meetings, attending each meeting and reporting back to the group at large (through the web site or e-mail lists). One of her responsibilities will be to facilitate connections between groups; these connections were generally thought to be important and numerous. Although this is not a clerical position, she will maintain the group's web site and e-mail lists. Individual working groups may maintain their own sites and/or lists, but should provide address and URL information to Jennifer. Next Meeting The next meeting of the working group chairs should occur after all individual groups have had their first meeting, which would place it in the spring (probably late spring). Since members could not plan with certainty that far in advance, and not all chairs were present, this issue was tabled for later discussion. If possible, the meeting will be scheduled in conjunction with another major meeting, which many of the chairs will attending, reducing travel time and cost.