THE SGML YEAR IN REVIEW    1992
                 by Yuri Rubinsky, SoftQuad Inc


STANDARDS ACTIVITY

1.  The highlight of the SGML year, I think most people would
agree, was the adoption of HyTime as an international standard.
Sort of like a child born already having been accepted into a
good university, HyTime has been considered for some time a
necessary component of many initiatives, including the grand old
US DoD CALS. I think we're going to see an outburst of activity
and creativity revolving around HyTime over the next year.

The standard will be published shortly by ISO in Geneva. Copies
will be available from national standards bodies like ANSI and
BSI; there will probably be a few authorized redistributors like
GCA and TechnoTeacher.

2.  Conformance Testing Initiative: Spearheaded by the GCA in the
US and the National Computing Centre in the UK, the SGML
conformance testing initiative slowly but surely attempts to
gather the momentum (and money) it needs to proceed. There seems
to be general agreement that independent testing of SGML
capabilities is needed (with some vocal exceptions citing
examples of the market deciding what conformance means) but no
agreement whatsoever on where the money should come from.
Nonetheless, the GCA GenCode Committee continues to explore the
possibilities.

3.  The SGML Review: ISO regulations call for a review of each
standard around the time of its 5th birthday. That review will
continue over the next few months; Dr. Goldfarb is chairing the
Special Working Group on SGML and invites comments and
suggestions.

4.  From Jim Mason, Convenor of WG8, comes the following news
clip:
"There are two query languages for SGML documents being developed
in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8: HyQ, as part of HyTime, ISO 10744; and
an unnamed language as part of DSSSL, ISO/DIS 10179. We are
developing two languages because these two standards, while they
both manipulate SGML documents, are partially complementary in
scope and functionality. DSSSL deals with pure SGML files.
Although HyTime requires the `hub document' to be in SGML,
subsidiary documents may be in any format, including binary
digitized audio or graphics. DSSSL and HyQ both operate on
property sets defined in SGML. DSSSL's location model is entirely
in terms of SGML structures (where an element is in the tree, its
relationships to its siblings, and so on). HyTime also needs to
deal with finite coordinate spaces (this happens three seconds
after that). As of the September meeting of WG8, we feel that in
areas of simultaneous interest, there should be simple mappings
between the languages."

5.  DSSSL, which I hope will be the highlight of next year's Year
in Review, is expected to go out for a second draft ballot about
April, 1993.

USER GROUP ACTIVITY

1.  Here's a good piece of "you heard it here first" news: Today,
[Oct. 26, day one of SGML '92] on the other side of the planet,
that is, about 12 hours from now, the Australian National SGML
User Group is being formally incorporated under the name SGML OZ.
Chaired by Carlyle Nagel, the group's inaugural sponsor is Xerox
Australia, who, in Carlyle's words, "provide the tea and
biscuits". Congratulations to that group on this exciting and co-
incidental day

2.  A Mid-Atlantic SGML Users' Group has been formed, catering to
SGML Users' living in Atlantis. Well, the Washington D.C. area
actually.

3.  With the International SGML Users' Group having started in
the United Kingdom, it was often easy for everyone to think of
the International group as meeting the needs of a local chapter,
but of course local chapters have a separate role to fulfill, and
accordingly those big islands finally have their own U.K. SGML
Users' Group with Nigel Bray as Chairman.

4.  The Southern Ontario User Group (covering a broad sweep of
area more or less centered on World-Series-winning Toronto,
Canada) recently held a successful vendor day and continues to
publish its newsletter.

5.  A Seattle User Group has begun, under the sponsership of DEC.

6.  Meanwhile in Colorado, what I mentioned last year as the
planned Boulder SGML User Group finally got off the ground last
month with its first meeting and a working name of The Rocky
Mountain SGML Entity.

7.  The Dutch Chapter of the SGML Users Group reports that it had
a difficult year, due to the resignation of Dieke Van Wijnen as
secretary of the Group. In September the group found a new
secretary and now activities are resuming, including on November
25th, a one day conference on the managerial implications of the
introduction of SGML applications. On December 9th, the annual
meeting of the group will be held.

MAJOR PUBLIC INITIATIVES

1.  The Air Transport Association/Aerospace Industries
Association subcommittee responsible for text standards has just
released Revision 31 of Specification 100. This standard includes
six DTDs covering a range of technical maintenance publications
(including Aircraft Maintenance Manuals, Engine Ship Manuals and
Service Bulletins). The new spec also includes a DTD Requirements
Document and an SGML Data Dictionary (an industry-wide list of
reusable elements and attributes).

2.  Latest news on the CALS front is that MIL-M-28001B is
expected to be released about March. Revision B will include
significant changes in the Appendix B Output Specification, a
tagging scheme for partial document delivery requirements, and a
tagging scheme meeting the requirements for electronic annotation
and review requirements.

MIL-STD-1840B availability will be announced at CALS Expo '92. It
is expected to provide more flexibility in data delivery such as
accomodating other data types, device-independence, and tape
medium.

3.  The Commission of the European Communities (CEC) is funding
the TIDE (Technology Initiative for Disabled and Elderly people)
Pilot Action.

Within TIDE, the Communication and Access to Information for
Persons with Special Needs (CAPS) project started in December
1991, and will last until the end of March 1993.

This project's main objective is to provide broader access to
digitally distributed documents (especially newspapers, books and
public information) to a significant group of handicapped and
elderly persons who have difficulty in accessing the printed word
and/or electronic information. The print disabled group includes
the blind, the deaf blind, the visually impaired, the dyslexic
and those with motor impairments that make it difficult to
physically control paper documents or to use traditional methods
for computer access.

Working with the CAPS committee, Manfred Kruger of MID has
written a DTD for electronic delivery of newspapers    including
such interesting and once-you-think-about-it-perfectly-sensible
constructs as an entity for an "invisible blank". This is the
character that tells a voice synthesizer to break the current
word into parts which are pronounced separately.

4.  In a related item, a related committee with some overlapping
membership, a working sub-committee of the International
Committee for Accessible Document Design, has completed a draft
DTD to support the formatting of braille from SGML. This DTD was
accepted by the full committee last week and will now go forth to
the Texas legislature to become part of state law regarding
accessible electronic versions of all textbooks approved for use
in the state educational system. Anyone interested in learning
how to make new or existing DTDs "braille-ready" should contact
the author at SoftQuad. (+1 416 239-4801)

5.  In a single year, the Davenport Group, as part of its
"Davenport Advisory Standard for Hypermedia (DASH)" activity,
started (in January) and by December will have completed the
design and publication of a set of HyTime-based SGML
architectural forms, tentatively dubbed the "Standard Open Formal
Architecture for Browsing Electrical Documents," for the standard
representation of indexes, tables of contents, glossaries, and
cross references, for use with online documentation on Unix and
Unix-like Open Systems. Unix International, the Open Software
Foundation, Novell and others participated in this development,
and the Open Software Foundation is probably going to implement
the SOFABED architectural forms immediately.

6.  X Consortium, the people who brought you X-Windows, has been
presented with a protocol, proposed by Kent Summers of EJV and
Jeff Vogel of EBT, for online help servers. The proposal puts
forward a scheme which takes advantage of the hierarchical
tendencies of SGML models but also can support anything else that
has a notion of unique identifiers.

7.  As evidenced by the turnout from the drug industry at SGML
'92, there is strong interest in SGML from the point of view of
the manufacturers and of the US Federal Drug Administration.
Simultaneous with the first two days of this conference is a
CANDA (Computed-Assisted New Drug Applications) conference in
Washington, at which they are discussing SGML. The FDA has said
it wants electronic submissions of New Drug Applications by 1995
and is interested in experimenting with SGML. The Pharmaceutical
Manufacturers Association Task Force has suggested an SGML pilot
project.

8.  The CAD Framework Initiative (CFI    a good example of a
nested acronym) has a task force to develop a semiconductor
industry SGML application for use in transferring component
documentation within the industry. This group deserves special
mention for its formal name:
CAD Framework Initiative Design Information Technical Committee
Components Information Representation Technical Subcommittee
Electronic Data Book Working Group Technical Documentation
Interchange Standard Task Force.

9.  The US Congress' 1990 Clean Air Act requires that by 1996 car
manufacturers provide all emissions system documentation to
anyone who requests it. That will be done in SGML, in an
application known as J2008 and created by a subcommittee of the
Society of Automotive Engineers.

10. Formatting images for CD-ROM publishing and other electronic
image management systems can be made easier if there is an
organized scheme to follow. The Association for Information and
Image Management C15.9 standards committee members are developing
a scheme for generating image tags, based on Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML), that will be compatible with numerous
image indexing and retrieval products. The objective of the
project is to assist users by providing a versatile path for
converting image files into other publishing systems' proprietary
formats or database files. The project is entitled Compact Disk
Read Only Memory (CD-ROM) Application Profile For Electronic
Image Management (EIM).

11. A healthy collection of standards bodies, including AFNOR,
BSI, DIN and the IEEE are all looking at using (and modifying as
necessary) the DTD in the "ISO Technical Report 9573: Techniques
for Using SGML" for standards creation and production.

The Canadian Standards Association is developing, with
InfoDesign, a new SGML-based information and publishing system,
currently in pilot test phase, to encompass all facets of the
standards development process at CSA. When complete, the
information and publishing system will allow all data relevant to
a document to be created directly in SGML allowing its retrieval
in both view-only format and editable SGML text, and publishing
to both hardcopy and CD-ROM directly from SGML.

12. The Text Encoding Initiative is nearing completion of the
second version, much after the hoped-for date, but
correspondingly more thorough and well thought out. A number of
major commercial publishers are encoding considerable volumes of
material in TEI (Chadwyck-Healey and Oxford University Press,
among others).

13. The European Workgroup on SGML is working on a DTD for
scientific journal articles, the so called MAJOUR Article DTD
(Modular Application for JOURnals). This DTD is based on the AAP
Article DTD and is intended as an exchange format between
scientific publishers, typesetter and printers, and database
hosts. Since last year, when the MAJOUR Header DTD was presented
at the International Markup Conference 1991 in Lugano, the EWS
has been working on the Article DTD, particularly body, tables,
figures, math, and back matter. The first draft version was
finished in February '92. Work on individual parts and the
documentation is still going on. The MAJOUR Article DTD is
scheduled to be finished by the end of the year and will be
presented at International Markup 1993. The EWS is trying to take
into account and harmonize its own work as far as possible with
the work and the results of other initiatives in the field such
as the AAP Tables/Math Update Committee and the AAP Article DTD
Update.

14. In April, Pam Gennusa of Database Publishing made a
presentation on SGML to the Text Working Party of the
International Press Telecommunications Council in London. In May,
the Associated Press hosted a seminar to introduce SGML to North
American print and broadcast media and vendors. At the June
meeting of the IPTC working parties and Standards Committee in
Toronto, the AP presented an initial draft of NIML, a News
Industry Markup Language, intended as a first step towards a full
SGML implementation for news text.

The NIML draft has since been republished in SGML News in
Australia, and been added to the libraries on CompuServe's
Journalism Forum. The IPTC has formed a joint SGML working party
with the Newspaper Association of America and the Radio-
Television News Directors Association.

MAJOR CORPORATIONS & GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES

1.  The US Department of Energy has adopted SGML as its standard
for electronic exchange of scientific and technical information
and the Office of Scientific and Technical Information in Oak
Ridge, Tennessee has been selected as the facilitating
organization. Various DOE organizations and contracters are
already participating in this effort and proposals have been
submitted for the backbone system.

2.  The Australian Parliament has just completed a review of its
publishing needs and has recommended SGML for the daily
publication of Hansard and supporting documentation. The
Australian Attorney General's Office is ramping up its use of
SGML, and the Australian Tax Office has an SGML pilot project
going which, if successful, will spread across the department.
The Australian Defense Publishing Group (DPUBS) has installed a
CD-ROM manufacturing facility, which is migrating to SGML.

3.  The U.S. Navy Defense Printing Service purchased an SGML-
based publishing system to be deployed at all printing service
sites, DoD-wide under the ADMAPS (Automated Document Management
and Publishing System) program.

Under the EDRADS (Electronic Document Retrieval and Distribution
System) program, the Navy is populating a document database of
all Military Specifications and Standards by scanning and
applying SGML tagging.

The U.S. Navy has begun a study on conversion of logistics
support analysis material directly to Interactive Electronic
Technical Manuals.

4.  Agfa won the 910S award to develop DTDs and FOSIs for US Air
Force Administrative material (and conversion of 10,000 pages).
With Agfa's recent re-organization announcements, the fate of
this award is, so to speak, up in the air.

5.  JCALS    the US DoD publishing system architecture contract
   was awarded this year to a project team headed by Computer
Sciences Corporation. With an estimated value over 10 years of
$750 million, JCALS is intended to provide systems which will
then be duplicated thoughout the DoD to receive contractor data
encoded to CALS standards. When complete, the system will be the
world's largest integrated information retrieval, document
database, editing and publishing system, consisting of hundreds
of sites with tens of thousands of users.

6.  In Holland, Fokker Aircraft is working on a CALS-like SGML
implementation.

7.  The Dutch Petroleum Company (NAM) owned by Shell and Exxon
has begun implementing an SGML application.

8.  Wolters Kluwer Law, has completed conversion of the entire
Law Database of Dutch legislation into SGML and is now converting
its looseleaf operation.

9.  Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets of New York City reports that
it would not be capable of maintaining its current volume of
business without the links between its structured database data
and its unstructured data that SGML provides. Frank Deutschmann
writes:

"Over the course of the year ... we have moved ALL wordprocessing
activities into the SGML environment (currently ArborText's
Publisher). Our business (trading derivative financial products)
involves detailed legal documentation for each trade (dozens a
day), and all documentation is now generated and stored in SGML
format. I believe that we are one of the first serious users of
SGML ... literally our whole business is based on SGML."

10. In New York City and London, MarketScope, Standard & Poor's
electronic market analysis service, is being launched
simultaneously through three on-line distribution services with
three different formatting requirements    all from a common SGML
source (created in SoftQuad Author/Editor).

11. In France, Bull is creating its user documentation in SGML
using an editorial system centered an Ingres database, and geared
to producing both paper and a CD-ROM.

12. Aerospatiale, with the help of AIS, has built a ground based
ELS (Electronic Library System) to take maintenance manuals and
transform them    both automatically and manually into documents
needed by Air Inter, the national airline owned by Air France.
Aerospatiale is to deliver the final system within the next
month. The system will also be available to other airlines.

13. Delta's TOPS System is up and running, producing native SGML
job cards. The system takes Boeing data into Datalogics' tagger,
using an older version of ATA Spec 100 DTD.

14. USAir is building a native SGML application for Service
Bulletins and other internal documents using IBM's TextWrite.

15. Boeing will be producing Service Bulletins in SGML and has
provided a complete maintenance manual as test data to the
airlines.

16. At the ATA Digital Maintenance Conference last month, 160
people from 60 airlines saw Digital Service Bulletins on SGI
computers with Arbortext's SGML Editor and MS Windows and
Macintosh versions of SoftQuad Author/Editor. All computer
platforms demonstrated the same business process: Service
Bulletin content being edited and re-ordered to become
Engineering Orders.

17. The Laboratory for Library and Information Science at
Linkoping University in Sweden is working with the Swedish

Defense Research Establishment in using HyTime to model dynamic
structures in crisis management systems incorporating, for
instance, information from geographical information systems.

18. John Duke of Virginia Commonwealth University, and consultant
George Alexander, a member of the original AAP committee, are
working on a project to convert the second edition of the Anglo-
American Cataloguing Rules.  (AACR2) to an SGML file. AACR2 is
maintained by an international committee and codifies the rules
that librarians throughout the world use to describe materials in
their collections. The electronic version of AACR2 will be used
not only to produce future print versions of the constantly
changing rules, but to develop software for online versions
linked to other cataloguing tools, for tutorial programs, and for
other research tools. Value-added developers of AACR2-e may
develop linkages to other products, such as the LC Rule
Interpretations or the MARC format documents.

19. The Department of Statistics at North Carolina State
University will be publishing The Journal of Statistics
Education, a newly organized electronic journal that will
maintain journal materials using SGML. Some assistance to authors
will be provided in producing the SGML documents, at least in the
short-term. The first issue of the JSE is targeted for July 1993.
The editors plan on using a modified version of the AAP journal
DTD.

20. SRC, the Semiconductor Research Corporation funds university
research and "pre-publishes" the results to its member sponsors.
It has said it will start delivering those findings
electronically in SGML by the end of this academic year. The DTDs
are done.

21. The Caterpillar Service Information System (SIM) project is
based on 11 DTDs and includes file system management software
developed by InfoDesign. To date, the system has received,
verified and catalogued more than 350,000 pages of converted SGML
text and graphics.

A second project, the Caterpillar File Management System (FMS)
built with Computer Sciences Corporation, a distributed, SGML-
based information management system, is now being implemented.

22. Microstar Software of Ottawa has received funding for a two
year research project in the area of SGML tools from the Canadian
Department of National Defense.

23. This year Microsoft released a CD-ROM multimedia package,
entitled "Cinemania" integrating several books about movies into
one complex reference source. Microsoft and Exoterica's
consulting group used SGML as an enabling technology in the
preparation of text data.

24. Mead Data Central has begun work on what may be the largest
non-government SGML application in the world. Over the next 2
years, they will be converting between 200 and 250 million
documents into SGML using 4,000 or more DTDs and 8,000 or more
FOSIs.

25. SunSoft, the Sun software subsidiary, is using SGML in its
online publishing tools. Documents in several popular electronic
publishing formats will be converted into online information
similar to SunSoft's AnswerBook online documentation product.

26. A company called FLUKE reports that it has built a filter for
its "Standard Input File Format" where it attempts to keep a
writer's file as close to ASCII text as possible and then implies
the markup to take it into an Agfa CAPS System.

27. The Cooperative Extension System, which includes the U.S.
Department of Agriculture Extension Service, 77 land-grant
universities and 3100 county offices, has appointed a working
group to develop a standard for encoding publications using SGML.
Extension publications include technical reports, fact sheets,
and pamphlets on agriculture, horticulture, home economics, youth
development    many of which incorporate images, tables, charts
and graphs.
In addition, USDA Extension Service is supplementing its paper
distribution system with electronic distribution over the
Internet. Documents will be encoded with SGML and formatted on
request for a variety of display technologies.

PUBLICATIONS

1.  Joan Smith, leader of the CALS in Europe Special Interest
Group and one of the founding fathers and mothers of SGML, has a
new book just out, called SGML and Related Standards published in
the UK by Ellis Horwood and distributed in North America by Simon
& Schuster.

2.  Oxford University Press has indicated to Charles Goldfarb
that The SGML Handbook has gone back to press for a second
edition.

3.  Eric von Hervijnen's book Practical SGML has sold 3000
copies. The Japanese edition of the book was published this year
by the Japanese SGML Forum. Eric is now working on a second
edition which will also be available electronically in Dynatext,
incorporating the ARCSGML parser with buttons that will allow you
to parse the book's examples. A wonderful case of using available
SGML technology technology beyond simply representing pages.

4.  SGML Inc., the editorial team behind <TAG>, the SGML
Newsletter, entered into an agreement whereby the GCA publishes
the newsletter. Another sign of SGML's continued growth is the
fact that <TAG> is now published monthly.

5.  The CALS Journal, a glossy colour magazine devoted to the
world-wide CALS initiative and with continuous coverage of SGML
in CALS, is now completing its first year of publication.

6.  Interesting and exciting SGML coverage in the mainstream:
BYTE magazine's June issue had a cover section on "Infoglut"
which included articles devoted to SGML by Steve DeRose and Lou
Reynolds of Electronic Book Technologies and Chris Locke and
Haviland Wright of Avalanche. The November '92 issue of Unix
World includes that magazine's first major mention of SGML in its
Standards column.

7.  The Seybold Report's coverage of SGML activities continues to
grow, recently with Mark Walter's long piece on September 7th
describing both Silicon Graphic's and Novell's committment to
SGML:

    "If we've been writing a lot about the Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML) lately, it's because a lot is happening.
The latest ringing endorsement of the standard: Silicon Graphics
and Novell will be converting their hardware and software
documentation into SGML for delivering the manuals on CD-ROM.

    The adoption of SGML by two big-name computer gear suppliers
   both of whom had ready access to vendor-based solutions   
reflects a growing awareness of the intellectual and business
advantages to putting critical information in a rich, portable
form. Adoption of SGML by the computer industry could spur more
widespread use and change the face of electronic delivery
software development."

8.  The November 18th Management Edition of Newsweek    which is
sent to 3/4 million management subscribers    includes an article
by Chris Locke placing SGML in perspective for managers. Locke
describes reasons why computer automation "has largely failed to
increase productivity" and goes on to say:
"A solution to both problems    universal document interchange
and the explicit encoding of document structure    is rapidly
arriving from a largely unheard of quarter. The Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is being adopted with
surprising speed by companies such as WordPerfect, Novell Frame
Technologies, Interleaf, Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment, and
Sony. The reason that this open, non-proprietary international
standard is situated at the heart of so many development efforts
is its ability to represent a rich set of document structures and
relate them to a humanly meaningful whole."

VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS

A couple of announcements this year suggest activity among
vendors that signal, I think, SGML's movement into the
mainstream:

1.  The WordPerfect Corporation, market leaders in the
wordprocessing world, demonstrated their SGML-conforming version
of UNIX WordPerfect, both at TechDoc and the recent Seybold
Conference. The product is in its beta test period now and will
be ported to MS-DOS next year.

2.  Adobe Systems has launched its Carousel product, which
accurately displays PostScript fonts and pages irrespective of
the computing platform they're sent to. Although there have been
no formal announcements, statements made at the Seybold
Conference by John Warnock and Adobe Vice President, Bill
Spaller, indicate that sometime next year a new version of
Carousel will be released with some SGML smarts.

3.  TechnoTeacher, Inc. demonstrated a prototype of its
"HyMinder" Hytime engine at TechDoc Winter 1992 last February.
TechnoTeacher expects to release the "HyMinder" product along
with its SGML document object library (called "MarkMinder")
during the first quarter of 1993.

4.  Quark, maker of Quark Express, has produced an alpha version
of a filter that exports Quark files in SGML-encoded form in
conformance with the ICADD Minimal DTD (for Braille).

Other vendors who have made announcements this year include: AIS,
Arbortext, Avalanche, Datalogics, EBT, Exoterica, Frame,
Intergraph, Interleaf, Oster & Associates, SoftQuad, Unifilt,
Zandar, and Westinghouse.

MISCELLANEOUS

1.  One sign of a growing market is the appearance of market
analysis: InterConsult has released an "SGML Software Market
Report" which divides the SGML market into useful sectors and
attempts to gauge both current and future sales levels. The data
is available both as a published document and with InterConsult-
developed software called Intuition, which allows one to build
one's own assumptions into a sophisticated analytical model.

2.  The next item is a reprise of one of last year's. I ended
this talk in 1991 by describing Michel Bielzinski's talk at the
International Markup Conference. Well, a recent issue of <TAG>
includes a very interesting piece by Michel on the same theme: a
comparison of space and time in HyTime and Einstein's General
Theory of Relativity.

3.  In December 1992 Exoterica will be releasing a CD-ROM
entitled "The Compleat SGML" containing the full text of ISO8879
integrating the 1988 amendment in online hypertext form.
Accompanying this electronic reference will be thousands of
sample SGML documents, comprising Exoterica's SGML conformance
test suite. Several enormous documents will also be provided for
benchmarking purposes.

4.  CURIA, the ancient manuscript project of the Royal Irish
Academy, has 6MB of text scanned and now being encoded from
printed editions of annuals, sagas, poems and prose works in
Irish Latin and Old Norse.

5.  Dynatext is being used in a math course (differential
geometry) at Brown University  with interactive 3D graphics and a
whole on-line text book.

6.  This is surely one of the great tidbits of miscellaneous SGML
news: At the recent mid-Atlantlic SGML User's Group meeting, the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency announced that SGML is a
strategic direction for the Agency.

7.  Reaction was so good at the SGML '91 Conference to Tommie
Usdin's paper cut-out dolls for modelling SGML content, that the
 GCA is now offering the package for sale.

8.  An SGML and LaTex volunteer group managed by Chris Rowley,
Ramer Schopf and Frank Mittelbach reports:

    "On top of this low level typesetting engine [LaTeX] we are
building a high-level language `for specifying the formatting
requirements of a class of structured documents' (i.e. for
prescribing how to format a document which conforms to a
particular DTD) and also implementing a `formatting engine' which
uses the specified formatting to convert an input document into a
PDL (primarily in TeX's DVI language, but this can be translated
directly into quite `low-level' Post Script or PCL or ...) This
will be, like the current LaTeX, a public domain system."

9.  The Integrated Chameleon Architecture, a software system for
generating translators to and from SGML DTDs, was made available
for public release in March 1992. A user's guide is also
available. Scheduled enhancements include the addition of a
capability to import already existing DTDs and to specify
attributes in DTDs.

10. CITRI, the Collaborative Information Technology Research
Institute, a joint research arm of the University of Melbourne
and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, has been
researching in the area of document retrieval. A group has
developed an SGML based hypertext information retrieval system
which uses tools such as Lector (University of Waterloo) and XGML
(Exoterica) plus their own database engine, Atlas, to provide a
platform for researching the retrieval of large, structured
documents.

11. The SGML Project, based at Exeter University in the U.K., has
continued to successfully promote the use of SGML within the
U.K.'s academic and research community. During this last year,
the members have given presentations on SGML to several
universities, businesses and conferences, established a major
electronic archive for SGML resources, and recently set-up an
email discussion list for the U.K. community. They are actively
seeking additional funding, and over the coming year intend to
establish workgroups to define criteria for evaluating SGML
software, to assess the software currently available, and to
write the DTDs and translators required by the academic
community.

12. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (a division of Caltech
contracted to NASA) began a project in 1985 called Planetary Data
System    a project to catalog and archive planetary data. Thus
far the project has only archived the plain ASCII text of
accompanying documentation, but is now looking into determining
the best way of archiving for the long term while making the
documents associated with planetary data available in multiple
output forms. SGML is being put forward as a possibility.

Finally, with JPL involved, SGML has the opportunity to become a
truly universal standard. Or at least galactic.