by Harry Lewis
In April, AFPC representatives converged on Toronto for our 26th meeting since 2004. With a grand total of 30 representatives – 20 in person, 10 remote – with 18 companies in attendance, there were a lot of points of view in play.
The big issue of the day was metadata, with Consortium members agreeing the time has come to adopt metadata conventions for AFP/A and (future) AFP/UA to match similar conventions already present in the PDF world. The proposal, to be developed within the Metadata working group, is set to bring new capabilities to the architecture, not the least of which will be more comprehensive indexing.
This meeting also saw the addition of a new member to our Board of Directors, with Dick Moerkens taking over from Michele Pracchi as Océ’s representative. Océ has been a constant contributor and long term board member and we welcome Dick in this capacity.
As we discussed in our wrap-up of Meeting #24, the Consortium continues to work toward defining a standard XML schema for validation. Guest company TallPine returned to support the discussion, while members CDP and ISIS Papyrus presented preliminary results of their collaborative effort.
Speaking of ongoing Consortium efforts, we are pleased to announce that ISO AFP/A is approaching the final stages before being officially published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a process which is expected to come to a close by the end of this year. Achieving certification from such a well-respected third party as ISO will be a huge milestone for the architecture. Stay tuned for further news on this topic as it develops.
As you can tell, there’s quite a bit going on in the world of AFP. Having just concluded our voting process for formally advancing the changes discussed in Toronto, we now look forward to our September meeting in Boulder. Be sure to keep an eye out for my next report from Boulder!