RE: Notes from September 9th Teleconference

["Carl Reed" <creed@opengis.org>]

September 9, 2003: Notes from the EM GIS SC Conference Call

 

In attendance: Carl, Rex, Art, Eliot, Tom M., Gary H.

 

There will not be a GIS SC Conference call on the 14^th of October.

 

The majority of the discussion focused on the EM Symbology requirements document. The following guidance was provided:

 

·       Separate requirements into 2 bins: art work and interoperability.

·       There is one crossover requirement that comes to mind: Accessibility requirements for screen readers which implies a requirement to have access to the symbols associated database record.

·       Start with a minimum set of requirements. There will be both a high priority and a lower priority set of requirements.

·       Agreed with suggestion that a couple more use cases would be good to have in the document. Rex volunteered to provide the one being developed for the Conference demonstration.

·       There was agreement that some level of intelligence needs to be associated with a symbol. A purely “dumb” symbol has minimal utility. Examples of intelligence are associated text and voice.

·       Reiteration that creating a normative vocabulary of symbol names is very high priority.

·       Internationalization (level 2) is a requirement but initial focus will be on US requirements.

·       Associated with internationalization is Versioning. Need to be able to deal with symbol versions. There will be updates, additions, etc to the normative EM Symbol set.

·       A potential future area of requirements is the ability to use pen and tablet devices (part of the larger requirement to allow field entry and edit using EM Symbols).

·       What about things other than visual symbols, such as audio alerts.

·       Artwork should be available in multiple files sizes as well as black and white and color. Some feel that rules are not appropriate because the client then needs to interpret these rules and support some rendering technology such as SVG. (Chair’s note: I believe we need more discussion in this area. Many hand held devices now support multiple rendering technologies as well as j2me.)