16th CEN/ISSS CDFG meeting

ETSI, Sophia Antipolis, France 2006-03-16/17 1000 (Thursday)–1300 (Friday)

1 Meeting arrangements

The CDFG chair opened the meeting at 1045. The part relating directly to ETSI, in particular agenda item 5.3 on the second day of the meeting, was co-chaired by Mike Pluke.

A list of participants is included in Annex A (not included in this version).

2 Approval of draft agenda

Document CDFG-N214R1 – The agenda was approved as presented with the following additions: Following item 4.5 a new item is included: “Swedish keyboard layout”. Subsequent items under 4 are renumbered. Following item 4.11 (original item 4.10) two new items are included: “Lithuanian characters” and “European standard for Sami and Romani”. Under agenda item 5.3 (“ETSI HF”) one presentation by Karl Ivar Larsson was given on the first day of the meeting, while the other presentations were given and discussed as a special session of the second day of the meeting.

3 Minutes of the previous meeting

3.1 Approval of the minutes

Document CDFG-N213

3.2 Review of Action List

Document CDFG-SD-ActL (2006-03-15)

The notes of the review are presented in document CDFG-SD-ActL (2006-03-18) together with new Action Items. The new list of action items is circulated independently. During the review of the Action List the following items were noted and decided: Under Action Item 14/05:

Action Item 16/01: The Secretary to make sure that a link to www.cdfg.org be established at the CEN/ISSS web site.

Action Item 16/02: The Secretary to change references to “Statskontoret” to “Verva”.

Action Item 16/03: The Chair and Secretary to look into ways to make the CDFG web site (www.cdfg.org) somewhat more “colourful”; and to develop a “paper document” (in the form of a printable pdf file) for presentation at conferences, etc.; and to include more contact information on the site, including telephone number of the Secretariat and email address of the Chair.

Action Item 16/04: All CDFG members to submit any suitable paper, presentation, or information for publication on the CDFG web site. Presentations may be in any language. Under Action Item 14/06 it was noted that the action should be repeated in connection with the next Unicode Conference that takes place in Europe, possibly in the form of proposing a BOF session (“Birds-of-a-Feather” session) at that conference.

Action Item 16/05: The Chair and Secretary to take the initiative that a BOF session relating to CDFG activities be held at the next Unicode Conference that takes place in Europe. Under Action Item 14/09 it was noted that a place-holder page for withdrawn CWA documents has been included in the CDFG web site. However, at the time being no relevant CWA document exists for posting under that page. The page will be retained and documents posted whenever relevant. It was decided that a formal restriction to “withdrawn CWAs” is not necessary. Any relevant document may be posted as long as it doesn’t cause any copyright issue etc.

Action Item 16/06: The Secretary to draw up a list of all CEN documents that are relevant to the CDFG, first as an internal document, later possibly for posting on the CDFG web site.

4 CDFG (including Programme of work)

4.1 CDFG financing and future

There was no discussion relating to this agenda item.

4.2 CDFG membership and participation

The Chair mentioned the untimely and sad passing of our long-time CDFG member John Clews.

Action Item 16/07: The Secretary to contact BSI asking whether they wish to nominate a National Member Body representative to the CDFG. The Lithuanian participants at the meeting, formally this time as guests, indicated that the Lithuanian National Member Body will wish to appoint a NMB representative to the CDFG, probably Mr Vytautas Zinkevičius. As soon as this has been confirmed, access to the Livelink server and the email list will be ensured.

Action Item 16/08: Lithuanian participants at the CDFG meeting to confirm Lithuanian NMB representation to the CDFG; and, following that, the Secretary to give the Lithuanian representative access to CDFG documents on the Livelink server and the CDFG email list. It was also noted that the Swedish “Statskontoret”, which has been Mr Wolf Arfvidson's affiliation, and which also is mentioned on the CDFG web site, has been reorganized. The correct affiliation now is Verva, “Verket för förvaltningsutveckling / the Swedish Administrative Development Agency”. Its web address is http://www.verva.se/, and email address is <name>@verva.se. (See also Action Item 16/02 under Agenda Item 3.2.)

4.3 Review of Project List

There was no discussion relating to this agenda item other than noting that funding options need to be sought for: ADNOM follow-up project; SoftCultReg (see Agenda Item 4.9); ICT requirements for lesser used languages.

4.4 Response to Ms Ruth Hieronymi, MEP

Document CDFG-N210

Ms Hieronymi represents the Bonn-Cologne area in the European Parliament. She has expressed great interest in the media sector, and she wants the CDFG to be in contact with the European Commission in relation to liberalization of the media, which may have significant negative impact on local broadcasting and cultural diversity in the media. It was noted that the issue has very many aspects on technical and political level. Our response to Ms Hieronymi should promote the importance of cultural diversity in the media.

Action Item 16/09: The Chair and Secretary to draft a response to Ms Ruth Hieronymi expressing our concerns in relation to cultural diversity in the media; and to take contact in the same matter with the Commission representative mentioned in her letter.

4.5 European multilingual keyboards

Action Item 16/10: Mr Erkki Kolehmainen to prepare, by the end of May 2006, a document describing the regional multilingual keyboard. It is important to underscore that the basic national and language-specific keyboards will not be changed, and a multitude of such keyboards will be retained. However, “foreign” characters need to be easy to produce from the keyboard, enabling any keyboard to facilitate the fulfilment of the requirement to represent all names in an acceptable way throughout Europe.

4.6 Swedish keyboard layout

Mr Karl Ivar Larsson presented the status of the national Swedish work to standardize a new Swedish keyboard. The presentation is available as document CDFG-N216. The Swedish standard now specifies: 241 Latin-script characters needed to write names in most European languages, 43 special characters, 96 Vietnamese additional characters as option. Emphasis has been placed on name-writing, since this is a formal requirement. Other characters may be needed in general text (e.g. special punctuation marks). The basic message from this initiative and the initiative discussed in item 4.5 is that any European keyboard needs to be able to produce any European text in a relatively simple manner. The Swedish and Finnish approaches are quite similar, even though it hasn’t been possible to eliminate all differences. These types of initiatives should be promoted. It is of the utmost importance that multilingual keyboards are implemented by the industry.

4.7 Proposed project eMMA

The item was not discussed.

4.8 Project ADNOM

The ADNOM CWA will be published by the end of March. The final CWA will be made a CDFG N document and posted on the Livelink server. It was noted that there are very encouraging developments regarding a continuation of the project.

4.9 Proposed project SoftCultReg

Document CDFG-N215

Comments to the document have been received from CEN (Ms Gaïd Le Gall). These will be discussed by the Task Force. The project will also be closely coordinated with the CLDR project under Unicode. It was noted that it probably makes sense not to include industry as a stakeholder, since that would require more industry participation than what is likely to happen. The SoftCultReg is primarily a public interest initiative. The CDFG believes that the preliminary SoftCultReg project plan describes a useful and feasible project. The TF is asked to continue its work. It may be feasible to produce a joint proposal from the CDFG and ETSI, or possibly a “CDFG project” with an explicit statement to the effect that there is an “intention to include ETSI in the work”.

Action Item 16/11: The SoftCultReg Task Force to produce a final SoftCultReg proposal by the beginning of May 2006.

4.10 CEN/TC 304

4.11 Format for electronic meetings

The Chair reported that the Fachhochschule / University of Applied Sciences Worms may be able to host “net meeting” facilities with optional telephone access. The CDFG will then choose this as its primary option for electronic meetings.

Action Item 16/12: The Chair to circulate relevant information relating to the installation of “net meeting” facilities at Fh-Worms.

4.12 Lithuanian characters

Mr Vytautas Zinkevičius presented problem relating to Lithuanian character set and sorting. The presentation is available in document CDFG-N218, and a “proposal to add Lithuanian accented letters to UNICODE and ISO/IEC 10646 standards” is available as document CDFG-N217. (It shall be noted that these documents have been successfully reproduced following the installation of a special Lithuanian font on the Secretary’s computer, which in turn has been embedded in the pdf documents.) The CDFG noted that all the characters in questions may be encoded by the decomposed character approach. It is then essential that one should not use the “private use area” of Unicode, which isn’t supported by industry (and never will be). Unicode has decided in principle not to introduce new decomposable characters. Character composition sequences can now even be named. The CDFG recommends that this approach should be followed. The most difficult is legacy databases etc. Rendering and search in new data is not a big problem using the latest technology. However, the CDFG obviously agrees that all these problems need to be resolved. An approach would be to have a Lithuanian character set registered by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2. This would be a basis for software support. The accented “i” (with visible dot) is a glyph variant issue from a Unicode point of view. There is an upcoming meeting of JTC 1/SC 2 is in second half of April 2006 in Mountain View / CA. Input to that meeting should be presented in early April. The Lithuanian National Member Body needs to be involved in this process. The next step now would be that the Lithuanian NMB submits a total list of characters in a “named sequence” decomposed characters scheme. The submitted document (CDFG-N217), in particular “Addendum I” and “Addendum II”, will be a very good basis for this submission. Some CDFG members are of the opinion that the Unicode Consortium should re-visit its decision not to allow new precomposed characters. Europe should request that all official European languages be adequately represented in the base Unicode character set. The idea of “freezing” this is based on the assumption that culture doesn’t change. The CDFG may wish to advocate a modification of this assumption. Resolution: In the recognition of the need for languages of the CEN area to be fully supported by ICT systems and standards in all respect, the CEN/ISSS Cultural Diversity Focus Group (CDFG) urges relevant standards bodies and in particular ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 and the Unicode Consortium to specifically recognize Lithuanian characters in their relevant standards. How this should be done may be a matter for some discussion in the CDFG and in other bodies. From a CDFG point of view this may now be done in two steps: First all relevant decomposed sequences must be registered. Later the CDFG may decide to attempt to open a discussion to register additional precomposed characters.

Action Item 16/13: A Task Force [Vytautas Zinkevičius (and any other Lithuanian member(s) as desired), Erkki Kolehmainen, and the Chair] to follow up the question of the registration of Lithuanian characters as precomposed characters, in order to prepare a proposal to be discussed at the next CDFG meeting. The TF will work by email and electronic meetings. 4.13 European standard for Sami and Romani Mr Karl Ivar Larsson commented briefly on the Sami issue.

Action Item 16/14: Mr Karl Ivar Larsson to follow up the contact with the Swedish Ministry of Agriculture relating to the issue of “Sami ICT requirements”, if possible in cooperation with the relevant Finnish and Norwegian ministries. He also reported that some work on Romani may be initiated on national level in Sweden. The CDFG noted that further work needs to be done relating to the generic requirements, as discussed by the CDFG previously (see also Action Item 14/12).

Action Item 16/15: The Chair and Secretary to follow up the work with the description of a proposed workshop for ICT requirements for minority and regional languages.

5 Various European projects and activities

5.1 CEN/ISSS WS/eCat

There was no detailed discussion about this agenda item.

Action Item 16/16: The Secretary to circulate information about follow-up actions from CEN/ISSS WS/eCat.

5.2 CEN/ISSS European e-Business Interoperability Forum (eBIF)

The Chairman reported that the update of the Road Map has been completed and approved. It is currently being printed, and it will be presented later this month.

5.3 ETSI HF

Several presentations were made under this agenda item. The first presentation was made on the first day of the meeting (Thursday 16 March). The morning of the second day of the meeting (Friday 17 March) was for the remainder of the presentations and relating discussions under this agenda item.

2) Mr Karl Ivar Larsson presented the work of the new ETSI STF 300 “Character repertoires, ordering and assignments to the 12-key telephone keypad – European languages and languages used in Europe”. The presentation is available as document CDFG-N219.

3) Mr Mike Pluke presented ETSI STF 287 “User-oriented handling of multicultural issues in multimedia communications”. The presentation is available as document CDFG-N220.

4. Mr Martin Böcker of BenQ Mobile, member of ETSI STF 285 and 300, presented “Language and cultural diversity – Current activities at ETSI”. The presentation is available as document CDFG-N221.

5. and 6. Ms Françoise Petersen gave the presentations “ETSI STF on Generic spoken command vocabulary for ICT devices and services (official EU and EFTA languages)” and “Multicultural and language preferences in user profiles”. The presentations are available as documents CDFG-N222 and CDFG-N223.

7. and 8. Mr Mike Pluke presented the document ETSI EG 202 421 (available as document CDFG-N224), and he gave a presentation on “Multicultural communication”. The presentation is available as document CDFG-N225. There was some discussion relating to language recognition vs. language generation. Telecommunications systems need very detailed encoding of language variants for speech recognition, while more generic identification is needed for language generation. In some respect they need language identification down to the individual level. Predefined tagging may not be adequate down to the level needed. This may be resolved partly through registered subtags, partly by private-use tagging.

5.4 Project Lyra

5.5 Project Textgrid

The Chair presented the project briefly. Issues for standardization will be addressed by the project later, and presented to the CDFG. See also HYPERLINK "http://www.d-grid.de/" http://www.d‑grid.de/ and HYPERLINK "http://www.textgrid.de" http://www.textgrid.de.

6 European coordination of international activities

6.1 ISO/TC 37 activities

There was no discussion about this agenda item other than noting that the next meeting of the committee will be in Beijing in August.

6.2 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 activities

Mr Erkki Kolehmainen reported briefly that an “accident” has brought Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 slightly out of sync (4 characters). The issue will be remedied later, and no problem is expected.

6.3 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22 activities

6.4 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 35 activities

Mr Mike Pluke reported briefly on ongoing activities.

6.5 ISO IEC ITU UN/ECE MoU/MG

An upcoming meeting (in March) will have CDFG matters on the agenda, in the form of a statement prepared by the CDFG Chair. Unfortunately there will be no representation of the CDFG at that meeting. If ratified the statement may have on impact on a number of eBusiness projects.

6.6 Unicode CLDR

Mr Erkki Kolehmainen reported briefly on the current schedule of the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). Entry of primary data will end on Wednesday 22 March. Following that there will be vetting until the end of April. Then the CLDR will be released.

7 Next meeting(s)

An electronic CDFG meeting was scheduled for Monday 19 June 2006, starting at 10 (CEST). The next physical CDFG meeting will be on Friday 29 September 2006 (10–17) in Worms (Germany).

8 Any Other Business

None: Minutes of Sophia Antipolis (last edited 2006-07-21 08:58:23 by MKuester)