CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Peter Kirstein/UCL ODA Minutes Agenda o Introduction of Participants. o Discussion of Charter. o Review of Documentation available. o Consideration of current status of standardisation. o Review of facilities needed for IETF-ODA Pilots. o Review of possible products. o Discussion of interaction with message systems. o Discussion of interaction with other working groups. o Review of possible programme and timetable. o Proposed further actions. o Methods of Working. o Arrangements for future Meetings. The attendees outlined their interests in the Working Group. Most were interested to use facilities provided to them; few were interested in developing facilities themselves. There was interest in the functionality of ODA, therefore a tutorial by Frank Held was organised as an evening session; it was attended by about 25 people. The group agreed that they would like to use existing software - but needed to know what was available. The Chair outlined the capabilities of ODA; it would enable the interchange of documents with various text capabilities (including Fonts), geometric graphics and bit-map graphics. It would allow, therefore, interchange of processable documents between different word processors. The bit-map graphics supported both Group 3 and Group 4 facsimile formats - potentially of interest to the NETFAX Group. The standard is very general. To ensure the capability of document interchange, it is essential to define also a Document Application Profile (DAP), to which any product must conform. A particular DAP has been developed in Europe under the PODA project, and a number of products exist to this DAP (Q112,[1]). The Chair stated that software will be available to allow documents preparation and storage, and also document interchange to the DAP. He had identified three products which would support ODA from the beginning at the 3rd quarter of 1991: the SLATE editor from BBN (with UCL additions), a product from Xerox, and 1 various DEC products for CDA. A version of WORD from Honeywell-Bull, and of WordPerfect from ICL would probably exist, and other products could be available by the summer. It was proposed, and agreed, that the group will try to get started as soon as possible on a pilot activity. The members of the group would want to experiment with the facilities themselves; if they were satisfactory, they could try to get other user groups interested. For a User Pilot, it was necessary to have not only an editor which could produce an ODA stream (ODIF), but also combine it with a mail system. The ODIF stream contained arbitrary 8 bit binary; therefore it could not be sent by RFC 822 mail without modification. Luckily the SMTPEXT group were proposing both a short-term and longer term recommendation for the extension of that system to support binary data. Another mail system (X.400) was the brief of the OSIX.400 Working Group; that system also supported binary data. It was agreed that the present Working Group make known its needs to, and use the mail systems defined by, the other two Working Groups. We need not consider mail further inside the present Working Group - except to make recommendations based on the actions received from the other groups. Some of the products of interest with the ODA capability (WORD, WordPerfect) existed currently only for PCs. The WG participants felt that they were already making adequate ad-hoc arrangements to incorporate documents from PCs into mail systems, and did not need - or want - the Working Group to address the mechanisms needed. In accordance with the Charter, the Chair promised to provide further details of product availability before the end of April. By that time, the interim recommendation of the SMTPEXT Working Group should be available. The aim was still that sufficient information should be available by that time, that an initial set of trials by participants should be possible between the lst and 2nd quarters of 1991, and that a detailed plan for a PILOT should be ready for the next IETF meeting in Atlanta. It was not thought necessary to have a further meeting prior to the next IETF, but a meeting during that week was planned. A set of documents relating to ODA had been put in an archive - further documents will be added to this database as they become available. Reference 1. EWOS: ODA Document Application Profile Q112 - Processable and formatted documents - Extended mixed mode, PrENV 41 510, Paris, 1988. 2 Attendees Richard Bowles bowles@stsci.edu Ross Callon callon@bigfut.enet.dec.com David Crocker david_crocker@palo-alto.pa.dec.com Shari Galitzer shari@gateway.mitre.org Russ Hobby rdhobby@ucdavis.edu Darren Kinley kinley@crim.ca Peter Kirstein kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov Vincent Lau vlau@sun.com David Miller dtm@ulana.mitre.org Robert Morgan morgan@jessica.stanford.edu Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil George Sanderson sanderson@mdc.com Mark Sherman mss+@andrew.cmu.edu Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us John Veizades veizades@apple.com Wengyik Yeong yeongw@psi.com 3