Notes of the IFIP WG 1.6 Term Rewriting business meeting, Trento, 1 July 1999 Chaired by Prof. Hsiang. Meeting opened at 17:07 Prof. Hsiang displayed a slide of issues to be discussed: Working model of the WG - should there be a common project or concrete goal? - what should be the form of future meetings? Participation in August 2000 at the IFIP TC1 International Conf. on Th. Comp. Sci., Sendai, Japan Relationship to RTA and other conferences Next meeting: where, when, how He invited members of other working groups to describe how things were done there. Jouannaud noted that some other WGs had an impact through a common project, citing the examples of Algol 60 and Algol 68. He suggested as a project for us, promotion of software produced by the term rewriting community, by evaluating it writing reviews, and displaying reviews on a web page. Helene Kirchner mentioned that the WG on software specification published a book on system specification with algebraic methodology. The ESPRIT working group COFE worked as advisor for evaluating research in its area. It also held meetings like this one for its members to communicate to each other what they were doing. Corrado Bohm said that he would like to see an implementation-oriented standardisation of a concept of rwriting, and mentioned for comparison IFIP groups such as 2.2 (programming language description languages). Meseguer said that meetings of WGs tend to happen in conjunction with a conference (not necessarily the same one every year). There followed some discussion of the possible conferences for the WG to meet at in 2000. Richard Kennaway mentioned that RTA2000 would take place on 10-12 July in Norwich, England. Hsiang gave some description of TC1: 17-19 August, Sendai, a large and ambitious conference covering many areas, whose organiser would like to see some form of WGTR participation. Claude Kirchner mentioned the Workshop on Rewriting Logic in September. Pierre Lescanne raised several questions: 1. Given the range of topics we had seen presented during the WGTR meeting, what is the field of term rewriting? 2. What are the related conferences? RTA, TLC, CADE,... 3. What is the future of RTA? There are fewer and fewer submissions each year. 4. Who should come to this working group? We are mostly senior people in the field, we also need junior people. Venturini-Zilli said she would like there to be a rewriting digest or newsletter distributed by a mailing list. Hsiang said we had a mailing list already. We need a good web site to contain software, benchmarks, etc. Lescanne pointed out that there is already a web site, run by Nachum Dershowitz. What connection would these proposals have to existing initiatives? Dershowitz said it would be easy to put an IFIP logo on the web pages, but this would only be cosmetic. Perhaps someone could offer a centralised site? Lescanne said it would be better to improve on what already exists, not create something from scratch. Hsiang said that one thing we could do as a service to the community would be to synchronise all these web sites and mailing lists to avoid duplication. The rewriting page at Nancy and the open problems page were also mentioned. Claude Kirchner said it would be good to have a newsletter like the LICS newsletter, if someone is willing to organise it. Hsiang asked for volunteers, and asked Bonacina, as the publisher of another such newsletter, how much work it would involve. Bonacina replied that the work consisted of keeping a membership file and collecting items for the newsletter -- not much work. Hsiang said it would be a great idea if there was someone enthusiastic to do it. The meeting returned to the topic of next year's venue. Hsiang said it seemed unlikely that our meetings would ever be in the US, and asked if there were any objections to meeting at RTA. There were none. Richard Kennaway said that as local organiser for RTA2000, he would be willing to host the WGTR meeting. The meeting agreed on RTA2000. Hsiang turned to the issue of getting new blood into WGTR. Meseguer suggested that we invite people to our meetings with observer status, and then invite them to join. Lescanne asked what rules IFIP laid down for WGs. Hsiang said that IFIP set no procedure for joining a WG, but had a rule that a member would be dropped after missing 3 meetings. Helene Kirchner said that other WGs get new members by invitation. Hsiang proposed that for our next meeting, we ask our members for suggestions of who to invite. But he would prefer that the meeting stay reasonably small, so as to be informal and manageable. We cannot invite everyone. Claude Kirchner said that the idea of software reviews was a good one but involved a lot of work. Dershowitz said that his web site already had many references to software, and we could solicit reviews. Ganzinger suggested the idea of "living reviews" -- a web site where comments and discussions could be accumulated. Dershowitz thanked the organisers, and the meeting closed at 17:53. ========