Minutes of CGM Open Meeting

1. Introduction

The meeting was a regularly scheduled summer meeting of CGM Open.

2. Attendance

23 people attended the meeting. See attendance list at the end of these minutes.

3. Proceedings

3.1. Business

3.1.1. Minutes of last meeting

The minutes of the Chicago meeting were approved.

3.1.2. Agenda and Minutes

The proposed agenda was adopted. Dieter Weidenbruck will produce the minutes of this meeting.

3.1.3. Next Meeting

October 1, 1998 at 8:30 am in Manchester, UK. Meeting agenda and arrangements to be circulated.

3.1.4. Incorporation

John Gebhardt gave a report about the status of the incorporation. The CGM Open Consortium, Inc has been incorporated in May in Delaware. The logistics for the sign-up of members have been prepared. A bank account and a signup form on the web site have been established. CGM Open will accept cash, checks, purchase orders and/or wire transfers.

So far the following members have signed-up:

- Bentley Systems
- Inso Corporation
- InterCAP Graphics Systems
- ITEDO Software
- Larson Software Technology
- System Development
- Xerox Corporation
- Zeh Graphics Systems

The 501C "not for profit" status has not been reached yet. This is underway but will take a couple of months according to the consulting lawyers.

3.1.5. Organizational matters

Lofton Henderson gave an explanation of the voting rights. Only sponsor members are allowed to vote on technical decisions.

Alan Hester from Xerox raised the question whether an election of directors is required. In order to incorporate the board has been named. The first election will probably occur at the March '99 meeting. This issue was postponed until September and will be discussed at the Manchester meeting.

It was discussed that by September the membership dues will be paid and that voting rights will be clear by then. There was a consent about the fact that membership is yearly whereas billing of membership dues is monthly.

There was also a consent about the alignment of CGM Open meetings with the ATA meetings. Other industries are showing increasing interest in the ATA specifications and a significant number of CGM Open members is represented at the ATA meetings. As WebCGM grows meetings may well revolve around web meetings or other industry shows.

3.1.6. Amendment of By-laws

The board proposed to change the first sentence of article 13,2 of the by-laws as follows:

The Corporation shall hold an Annual Meetings of Members within the first four months of each year for the purpose of conducting the elections of Directors and transacting such other business as may come before the meeting.

The decision about this proposal will be made at the Manchester meeting.

3.2. OASIS affiliation

3.2.1. Report of Paris meeting

During the SGML Europe 98 show in Paris Lofton Henderson, Dieter Weidenbruck and Dorothy Weatherby met with the board of directors of OASIS to discuss the possibility of a merger between OASIS and CGM Open. Dorothy Weatherby gave a report on this meeting. 5 board members from OASIS participated in this meeting. The basic outcome of the meeting was that CGM Open is interested to discuss the merger because of the obvious synergy effects for both organizations. The CGM Open board recommended to further investigate the opportunities but to proceed cautiously. CGM Open must clearly state expectations to OASIS.

3.2.2. Presentation by Robin Tomlin on OASIS

Robin Tomlin, CEO of OASIS, gave a presentation on OASIS. OASIS has been formed in 1993 as SGML Open to grow the market and educate people on SGML.. It has recently been renamed to OASIS to broaden the interest to structured information standards. Its board is made up of 7 members - President, Chairman, Chief Technical Officer, Chief Educational Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, Secretary/Treasurer, Chief Marketing Officer. OASIS is considering creating an "advisory council" to provide input from affiliate organizations like X-ACT or CGM Open. OASIS currently has 20 sponsor members, 36 contributor members and 15 participants. The sponsor members of CGM Open would become sponsor members of OASIS. Contributor members would have to decide whether they want to continue as contributor members of CGM Open or OASIS.

The next events sponsored by OASIS are the OASIS Summer Workshop (July 29-31, 1998, San Diego), Seybold San Francisco (Aug 31-Sep 4, 1998, SFO), XML Chicago (Nov 16-19), XML World Canada (Sep 14-17), SGML/XML Tokyo 98.

The OASIS web site can be found at www.oasis-open.org.

3.2.3. Discussion

The following discussion focused on the consequences a potential merger or affiliation would have. There was a consent to further investigate the opportunities for the following reasons:

- there seems to be a natural overlap of directions between OASIS and CGM Open
- a strong presence of CGM inside OASIS would be beneficial regarding the upcoming formats like PGML or VML

Possible concerns were discussed:

- OASIS has been totally text oriented so far. We need to get a feeling for how CGM would be handled in the future.
- We need to do a detailed cost/benefit analysis before a decision can be made

A consent was reached to take the next steps and re-discuss the matter at the Manchester meeting.

3.2.4. Next steps

- The board will set up a task group to further investigate the details of a fusion with OASIS.
- The board will set up a program and marketing task group to prepare proposals for

a graphics track at XML Chicago
further cooperation with OASIS

- CGM Open representatives will participate in the OASIS summer workshop in San Diego.
- CGM Open wants to participate in OASIS activities to promote/educate in CGM.

3.3. Web site

The logo competition is still running. We have 5 submissions so far. It was agreed to extend the deadline for the logo submission until July 15. On the same day voting will start. The voting period will end on July 22. Voting is restricted to sponsor members who have paid their dues.

A password restricted "members only area" was discussed. It was decided that this is not necessary at this point and is left as an option for the future.

Dieter will register the web site with the most important search engines. He will also create a "members section" where the current members of CGM Open will be listed.

3.2 Technical

The WebCGM task group presented the results of the work on the WebCGM profile. The documents were distributed to the participants. A list of issues was collected and the discussion was limited to those issues.

Documents:

• Intro Section Revision 1.0

- Section 1.5 - Change references so that Parts 1,3 are called out, Part 2 can be referenced for information only.
Add ATA and NIST web links
- Task to assign - draft 2.3.5
- Task to assign - draft a new 2.5 as a positive statement of use

• V1-V3 content Revision 2.0

- visual definition of markers 1-5 as symbols
- visual definition of line styles 1-15
- visual definition of hatch styles 1-6
- sequence tail for Unicode - Gebhardt
- register escape for alpha transparency - Lofton
- register colour models RGBalpha, sRGB, and sRGBalpha - Lofton
- register LZ77 (PNG) compression - Lofton
- register escapes for symbol design size and symbol reference point - Lofton
- get registry and determine next item numbers to put into profile - Lofton
- register escape for symbol background transparency - Lofton - also need to draft wording and default behavior (probably default to transparent).
- Action to Gebhardt - contact intellectual properties lawyer to determine position of Unisys.
- Allow Metafile Defaults Replacement
- Under restricted text type - Add "when text is present and it is V3 this element is required.

• V4 content

- Rev 3.1

- relationship between para and grboject
-- para's only attribute in content
-- para can contain grobject - maybe invent new "substring" element - Dave propose
- 3.1.1 - namechar definition set - remove
- 3.2.1.1 - Description - redraft to bring in line with the rest of the document
- 3.2.1.1 - viewer behavior - need a way to get from internal region to an external address table - research item for Dieter to propose something for 2.0
- Complex region - allow "2"n parameter sets in the SDR each set representing a region - behavior of "closed figure"
- Continue APS - needs to be resolved in the CGM standard to allow continuing an APS by using the same ID.

- Rev 3.2
- Content Model (picture goes into intro)
- Addressing paper
- Examples paper

4. Attendance List

5. Appreciation

Thanks to Dave Cruikshank for helping with minutes. Thanks to InterCAP for hosting the meeting.