Dear Member,

I am pleased to give you this report about the Society's last year (from May 97 to April 98) activities.

We concentrated ourselves in four different areas:

  1. Supporting ITU work
  2. Maintain our web site
  3. Promote the society activity
  4. Initiate the SDL Forum99 and the first SDL / MSC workshop (SAM98)

Supporting ITU Work

"SDL Forum society communication request was accepted by the ITU". In detail this means that:

  1. Members of the society can participate in SG10 expert meetings.
  2. The SG10 chairman can post the temporary documents of any SG10 meeting to the society. That was already done for the last year's (1997) SG10 meeting. All the documents can be found in the 'member only' area of our web site.

The SDL Forum Society supports the ITU work by paying Q6 rapporteur's expense (Rick Reed).

Maintain our web site

The SDL Forum Society web site is maintained using Microsoft FrontPage.

In order to be able to take the advantage of the tool and as a reaction to some complains about browsers not supporting frames, the look and feel of the site was changed. This change improves the load time of our pages, readability (hopefully) and maintainability of the site.

An archive of all mails sent to one of our three mailing lists (NEWS, SDL and MSC) was created.

In addition, a new 'member only' area was defined. So far, this area stores all temporary documents produced during SG10 ITU annual meetings and expert meetings starting from 1997.

A tutorial on SDL88 (based on a publication written by Frenc Belina and Dieter Hogrefe and with Dieter's permission) was put on the site.

We hope to add two new tutorials during this year, one on current SDL and one on MSC.

Promote the society activity

In order to promote the society and its activities, we took actions in the following area:

  1. Prepared a flyer.
  2. Start to directly contact companies and individuals from whom we know that they are interested or already using MSC/SDL
  3. We put information about our web site in more than 20 (major) search machines.

We hope to reach 100 members in the end of this year.

We will contribute papers about MSC and SDL to some conferences. We "encourage" our members to mention the society and its site when giving a talk about MSC and/or SDL.

Initiate the SDL Forum99 and the first SDL / MSC workshop

SDL Forum 99 - Montreal

The next SDL Forum will take place at Montreal University in June 1999.

The preparation of this conference, which is the first SDL Forum outside Europe, has already started. We soon will close the forum's program committee. The deadlines are currently under discussion. The suggestion is:

  1. Paper submission: 15 October 1998
  2. Acceptance notification: 20 November 1998
  3. Final copy: 20 December 1998
  4. Tutorials proposal: 1 November 1998
  5. Workshop proposal: 1 November 1998
  6. Exhibition reservation: 30 January 1998

First workshop on SDL And MSC (SAM) - Berlin

Humboldt University and GMD Fokus organize the first workshop on SDL and MSC. It will take place at GMD building from the 29th of June to the 1st of July.

A skeleton of the workshop was agreed during a program committee meeting (February, Berlin). The deadline for paper contributions was passed last weekend. No yet information about the amount of contributed papers. Inviting paper - it is under process with some already confirm talk, and will be continue during this month.

Additional information

Members

We have currently 40 members (~5 companies and the rest are individual members).

Mailing list

~400 people are register to the SDL mailing list, while ~200 people are register to the MSC mailing list.

Budget

 

Best regards,

Yair Lahav

Chairman

SDL Forum Society