IRC Conference/summary/2009-11-22

The Open Siddur Team introduced the project to special guest Refoyl Finkl, aka Raphael Finkel, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. Russel Neiss referred Aharon to Refoyl's project in the OCR of Yiddish text.
Discussion in the chat also revealed Refoyl had plenty of additional expertise in helping determine when qamatz qatan/gadol and sheva na/nach nikkudot would be applied to text.
Efraim announced that the project had acquired a good scan of the Siddur Torah Ohr, that had originally been incompletely transcribed in a text available CC-BY-SA at wikisource. We could use the new scans to proof that text and fill in any gaps.
Efraim also announced his progress in XSLT programming, writing "that with the current XSLT, you could generate a file containing most of pesukei d'zimrah or hallel." Certainly good news for progress on the Open Siddur back end.
Azriel announced his progress with the demo conversion of our source texts from our database into XHTML that one could actually view via a web browser. An important achievement!