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Iupap report to ICSTI

The attached word file is the short report to the ICSTI Assembly in
Stockholm of what IUPAP has been doing since the last Assembly.

Ian Butterworth
===========================================
Professor Ian Butterworth CBE FRS

Senior Research Fellow

The Blackett Laboratory
Imperial College
Prince Consort Road
London SW7 2BW
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7594 7525

Fax: +44 (0)20  7823 8830

E-Mail: i.butterworth@ic.ac.uk

Translated to text by HDF
-------------------------


Report to ICSTI of IUPAP Activity since the last Assembly in Munich 3-6
May 2001.

The IUPAP Working Group in Physics produced its First Report in July
2001 and is available at:
 http://www.iupap.org/finalrep.html . Most of the subsequent IUPAP
activities of interest to ICSTI are the result of recommendations in
that report.

A conference was organised on ' Long Term Archiving of Digital Documents
in Physics' and took place on November 5th-6th 2001 at CNRS Lyon
Villeurbanne. The programme and general details are available at:
http://publish.aps.org/IUPAP/program.html. A report of the Conference,
together with copies of slides presented are available at
http://publish.aps.org/IUPAP/ltaddp_report.html.  

IUPAP was of course represented at the Open Seminar on Preserving the
Record of Science organised by ICSTI/CODATA/ICSU at UNESCO Paris on Feb
14th-15th 2002. Highlights of the Lyon Meeting were reported there.

IUPAP has agreed that it will organise a register of electronic archives
in physics and has prepared a proposal cosponsored with Cornell
University for a one time grant to the Mellon Foundation to carry out
the preparation of the registry, and will look to get from publishers a
smaller amount on an annual basis to update and extend the registry. In
the proposal it is assumed that there will be an "expert group" to
determine whether archives are in danger of obsolescence. Discussions
are encouraging.

IUPAP has recently decided to set up a Technical Working Group on the
use of XML in physics. Its remit is:
1) The group will survey the present situation regarding mark up
languages, and in particular the use of XML in the physics area. They
should contact similar groups in other International Unions and should
note developments in Math Markup Language and Chemical Markup Language
to see where they impact on physics.

2) They should decide whether IUPAP should encourage the development of
a particular physics markup language to ease management of physics
information and the conversion of files without loss of semantic
information.

3) If they decide 'yes' they should suggest how it should be done.

4) In discussing such matters they would address: text, images, diagrams
,tabular and graphical information, hyper-linking both in publications
and in databases. They would presumably recommend metadata schema.



Ian Butterworth 
10th June 2002


-- 
VISITING GENEVA? See http://www.unige.ch/crystal/ahdf/geneva02.html

Howard Flack        http://www.unige.ch/crystal/ahdf/Howard.Flack.html

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