Meeting Notes 7/14/03

Just to recap, Ronen has been working on parsing and filling HTML forms, and Tyler has been working on parsing and filling PDF forms.

Steve has been working on the scheme merger, and on pulling data from the user's stored data and putting it in the format Ronen and Tyler need to fill the forms.

The big piece missing for a usable system is a GUI. Tynia and Behrooz, with possible help from Neeraj on the weekend, are going to tackle this piece. We can hope for something by Thursday, but that all depends on how the working with Java GUI tools goes.

We also had some discussion about the next steps, including categories of forms that might be useful. Ideas included:

• FAFSA/admissions forms (For those of you who are too old to remember your college years, but not yet old enough to have college-age children, the FAFSA is a long financial aid form.)
• post office forms, including change of address and mail stop.
• shopping
• taxes
• court forms (this is actually Satish's idea from the last email)

Also, it came up that we have a problem in that a lot of the most annoying forms (immunization records?) are on paper. How can we be useful there, when the forms don't start out in PDF? What if they are in PDF but aren't fillable? And many of the most promising fillable PDF forms are encrypted (eg., small claims court). Also, Microsoft is doing something called epaper...

Steve mentioned that at some point we're going to want a schema displayer/editor so we can create schemas for forms.

We also touched on issues security and encryption. How can this be handled when users don't store data on their own computer?

Tynia, Kris, Steve, Ronen, Behrooz