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!