The Minutes below should be considered a Rough Draft - 4/02/92 Megan
Current Meeting Report Reported by Peter Kirstein/UCL
The Chair repeated that for the ODA WG, some papers are available in an
electronic form on the UCL-CS info-server: "info-server@cs.ucl.ac.uk"
The documents are accessed by standard message systems, giving a message
body of the form:
request:ietf-osi-oda
topic:xxxx
where xxxx is the name of the document required.
A number of documents are available in the info-server - all in text form.
Many of the documents are also stored in ODA/ODIF format. The list of
documents currently in the collection is listed in a document called INDEX.
The latest document defining the current status is [1] below. It is
available on the info-server. It gives details about the current
implementations available for the Pilot. These are listed below:
PRODUCT Supplier Status Product Availability Source
SLATE/ODA V1.2 BBN/UCL OK Slate-yes Now UCL
Word-for-Windows/ODA v3 Bull OK Yes 4/1 Bull
DECWRITE/ODA DEC OK Yes Now DEC
Global View Xerox Testing Yes Now Xerox
UCL started shipping SLATE/ODA v1.2 in February 1992; this is based on
SLATE v1.2. Because of the late shipment, few have had a chance to test
it. BBN is planning to bring out V2 of SLATE during the second quarter of
1992; we expect SLATE/ODA v2 to be ready for shipping by the end of that
quarter. The Bull product is being released for shipping on 4/1; UCL has
tested it for conformity. The DEC product is available now, and has been
tested for conformity; no other site had tried a recent version of that
software. The Xerox product was delivered to UCL only just before the
meeting. It is still being tested for interoperability by UCL.
At earlier meetings, it had been hoped that a WORDPERFECT/ODA system from
University Politechnic of Catalonia would become available. Unfortunately
for two reasons this now seems less likely. UCL tested it during the
summer of 1991, and it was found non-conformant in a number of ways; no
new version has been received since. Second, there seemed to be some
contractual problems in getting that version used in the Pilot, because it
included some software from ICL - which UPC had not had permission to
release for the Pilot. Earlier UPC had stated that they intended to have
software entirely of their own available for the summer of 1992 - but
nothing has been heard further from them on that subject; the Chairman
could only assume that the WORDPERFECT software could not become available
for a Pilot in the near future.
During the discussion, it became clear that there was a requirement to use
a large number of National characters; for instance support for the
specific Nordic ones were requested by one participant, and of Greek ones
by another. It was considered desirable to use character set switching
according to ISO 8859/4 in the long term; mention was made also of ISO
10041. Neither the Bull nor BBN implementations support such characters;
no information was available on the DEC or Xerox ones.
A number of additions to the Q112 profile of the Standard are under
discussion; one of these is tables. If this became standardised, it is
probable that several of the implementations would include it shortly.
A number of small pilots were mentioned - a Nordic one, one based on Mitre,
one organised by UCL in Europe, and a small one at NASA-Ames. There was
interest in broader pilots. The Chair promised to set up a list of ODA and
normal mailboxes. This list will be available from ietf-osi-oda, and the
interested parties will be requested to provide their details to the Chair.
So far, most use of the systems were using X.400 for transport. Interest
was expressed in working with the Multi-media Mail format (MIME); this is
in accordance with the Charter, since this is the output of the SMTPEXT
group. The chairman mentioned that it had already been assured that ODA
was a recognised Content Type in MIME, and he promised to investigate when
there could be integration of MIME with some of the ODA products. There
is already a MIME implementation available to UCL, and he hopes to add it
to the UCL PP mail system during the next quarter.
It was expected that there would be substantial experience with the Pilot
prior to the next meeting which would take place during the July IETF
meeting in Boston.
Reference
1. D. Sadok et al: The ODA Document Convertors, UCL Internal Report No 2,
Version 3, March 1992.
Attendees
Harald Alvestrand harald.alvestrand@delab.sintef.no
Dave Crocker dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu
kathy Dodd kathy@mitre.org
Lew Jenkins lew@premenos.sf.ca.us
Peter Kirstein kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov
Dan Molinelli molin@trw.com
Brien Wheeler blw@mitre.org
Linda Winkler lwinkler@anl.gov
Peter Yee yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov
People So Far Receiving SLATE/ODA from UCL
FIRST NAME SURNAME ORGANISATION CITY COUNTRY
Velu Sinhu OKIDATA Framingham, Mass USA
Jim Knowles NASA-AMES Mountain View, CA USA
Mark Stansfield Paisley Coll Paisley Scotland
Mark Savela Telecom Res Otakaari Finland
Erik Lillevold NTRA Kjeller Norway
Encarna Pastor U. Pol. Madrid Madrid Spain
Knut Holm SINTEF Trondheim Norway
Trevor Hales CSIRO Carlton, Vic Australia
Naresh Kumar Touch Com Campbell, CA USA
Andrew Macpherson BNR-Europe Harlow, Essex UK
Paul Kennedy DEC Galway Ireland