draft blurb for the vote [was: minutes from meeting 20050823]

["Paul Grosso" <pgrosso@ptc.com>]

> The blurb to encourage companies to vote:
>  We need a paragraph for Mary to send 
> out with the vote. And we may need to lobby people with a blurb. Paul
> will pull a blurb together from the public page and the FAQ for this 
> and will send it out by the end of tomorrow.
> 

Here's my attempt--hack away:

----------------

XML documents and data often reference other external resources.  Often the
referencing information is not sufficient to locate unambiguously the
desired resource, the resource is not accessible at the given location at a
given time, or it is preferable that an alternate resource be used in place
of the referenced resource.

For example:

   1. External identifiers may require resources that are not always
available. For example, a system identifier that points to a resource on
another machine may be inaccessible if a network connection is not
available.

   2. External identifiers may require protocols that are not accessible to
all of the vendors' tools on a single computer system. An external
identifier that is addressed with the ftp: protocol, for example, is not
accessible to a tool that does not support that protocol.

   3. It is often convenient to access resources using system identifiers
that point to local resources. Exchanging documents that refer to local
resources with other systems is problematic at best and impossible at worst.

Entity Resolution is the process by which these resource references can be
mapped to another version of the reference that can be found or that is
preferred for other reasons.  To address these issues, the OASIS XML Catalog
specification defines an application-independent entity catalog that maps
external identifiers and URI references to (other) URI references.

Entity resolution catalogs have already been fairly widely implemented in
much deployed software.  Promoting the OASIS XML Catalog specification to an
OASIS Standard is crucial for continued interoperability of XML
applications.

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paul