[Last printing 2002-08-12]
In the absence of the Chair and Vice-chairs, the meeting was chaired by J. Nunn, Chair of the AES Standards Committee. There were no changes to the published agenda.
D. Schueller asked for a correction concerning the report of the item on project AES-X98. He said that far from stressing the importance of audio engineers being involved in the development of descriptive metadata he had said quite the opposite. The corrected sentence should read "D. Schueller questioned the competence of audio engineers to be involved in the development of descriptive metadata". There were no other corrections and the report was agreed.
The paper from Sistrunk was a revised version the Descriptive Metadata Specification presented at the previous meeting and which had been made more compatible with documents issued by the EBU (Technical Document: tech 3293 2001) and the Scandinavian A/V Metadata Group. Schueller again questioned whether the AES should be writing descriptive metadata standards as this was a cataloguing and not an engineering subject. Although Sistrunk's paper appeared to be very good, Schueller did not feel competent to judge whether or not it should be published. Nunn explained that the writing group led by Sistrunk consisted of cataloguers to ensure the right expertise was available. S. Herla pointed out that the EBU had worked in a similar fashion with input from cataloguing specialists to a technical committee.
The two papers by Ackerman deal with the subject of administrative metadata and were produced in response to a request at the last meeting for earlier documents to be drafted as PTDs. The two papers submitted were unformatted and therefore difficult to read. The working group had not seen them before the meeting and a meaningful discussion on them was not possible. Ackerman will be asked to format his documents into a more readable form so that they can be posted on the FTP site for further discussion.
After considerable discussion there was no conclusion as to whether the project should consider further areas of harmonisation.
The next meeting is scheduled to be held in conjunction with the AES 113th Convention in Los Angeles, CA, US.
(C) 2002, Audio Engineering Society, Inc.