OC2 Language Spec in March

["Considine, Toby" <Toby.Considine@unc.edu>]

I am sending this to the all of OpenC2 as well as the Language Spec  TC because of an important change comin up. 

(I know that one is a subset of the other, but I don't know what automatic rules members may have set up)

Jason Romano will have to step down as C-Chair of the Language Specification (and off the TC) at the end of the month. This means we are looking for someone to step forward as Co-Chair for this sub-Committee. The Co-Chairs are on overlapping two-year terms. 

Brian was 1.5 years into his term, so this is a commitment until next April for now. 

We are entertaining nominations, now. Please feel free to nominate yourself by reply to the list, or by contacting one of the Co-Chairs of the TC, or be contact me. You can, of course, contact any of the Chairs of Co-Chairs to discuss what is involved.

For the rest of the month, a clean hand-off is top priority. Jason has thought long and hard about the next steps, and those topics have now become the first priorities in time for the Language SC.

First of these is how to improve the JSON to meet some goals of the TC. A particular "style" of JSON crystalized at the last F2F and was prominent in the last two Public Reviews. That style becomes the basis for the standardizing the next profiles. We need to make that style explicit.

We do this with an eye toward discovery. It has long been a goal that there is some way to ask a device what it is, or rather what service requests it will accept. There are use cases wherein the requestor needs to validate the message passed EVEN IF it does not know how what the request is. I can imagine the ability to gather list of devices who support particular Services to be used by the new OASIS TC CACAO to coordinate the OpenC2 messages it generates.

Jason thinks we can do this with an eye toward composition as well. We may be able to compose the services in a message to incorporate two or more composable sub-messages. This may be considered as a form of sub-typing message elements, almost as defining a SmallTalk for security. 

We will want to dedicate plenty of time to this subject while Jason is still on the TC.

I am also hoping for a lot of knowledge transfer about using Git as a part of team management of the document writing process. Jason, working with Duncan as editor, led the way in this, and developed some procedures that made this more powerful while increasing transparency in our work. I confess that I watched more than did this. I am hoping for some knowledge transfer on this issue this month.

For now, this takes precedence over the issues I introduced about message and ID that I presented for discussion in my email on July 15 (https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/openc2-lang/message.php/201907/msg00000.html) There is also some overlap of how we address the modularity of the language, and how we address the JSON style.

The common JSON style also will lead to a greater consistency of _expression_ as we move forward into defining non-JSO serializations.

Please consider this carefully as you prepare for tomorrow's meeting, as a lively discussion is the best way to move through the issues presented while we can still get Jason's input.

Thanks

tc