[stdsreg] Call For Participation in standards registry metadatadefinition

["Karl F. Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

You have received this mail because you have previously responded to
Karl Best of OASIS or Bob Hager of ANSI that you are interested in
participating in the standards registry metadata definition project, or
we have spoken to you about this project and thought that you may have
some interest. This will be an "opt-in" mail list; details below. If you
are not interested but someone else from your organization is, please
pass this message along. The goal is to have representatives from a
broad spectrum of different standards groups.

The Standards Registry Metadata project is about sharing information in
order to increase the quality, value, and adoption of standards. The
idea is that by each standards organization sharing information about
the specifications that they are developing and have developed, other
standards organizations can identify overlaps with what they are doing
and then make efforts to establish collaborative relationships. Doing so
will reduce duplication and increase interoperability between
specifications. Users and participants can discover what specifications
are being developed and hence participate in standards development as
well as adopt standards for their use.

There exist today a number of different registries listing standards
organizations and/or the specifications that they are developing or have
developed. This project is not about replacing any of these existing
registries, but instead finding a way for them all to work together.
Because each of these registries stores its information in a different
way there is no single web search that will allow a user to find
information about all standards efforts. If each registry were to adopt
a single metadata to describe its contents, searches could be built that
would provide useful results.

We are proposing an effort to define a common metadata, which would then
be made freely available to all standards organizations and registries
to define their work.

Also up for discussion is how best to facilitate the connection of the
various existing and future registries so that a user can search them
all with a single query.

Of course it follows that this idea must be sold to a large number of
organizations, and that this project will only be successful if there is
a wide level of support from a large number of organizations. But a
first step must be made.

If you are interested in participating in this project of defining a
metadata to describe standards efforts, please subscribe to the StdsReg
mailing list by sending an email with the word "subscribe" as the body
of the message to stdsreg-request@lists.oasis-open.org. Once we have
subscribers I will propose a date and time for the first conference
call. OASIS will sponsor the mail list, web page, and first concall, and
we can rotate sponsorship of the concalls after that.

As a starting point I will propose the following straw man metadata.
This is based heavily on the NSSN registry hosted by ANSI
(www.nssn.org), and uses the ISO ICS classification
(www.iso.ch/iso/en/CatalogueListPage.CatalogueList). The top portion
describes the standards development organization (SDO) and the bottom
portion describes each current effort or completed specification. The
idea is to have the simplest set of fields that will usefully describe
standards development efforts and completed specifications.

SDO name
SDO acronym
SDO address
SDO phone
SDO fax
SDO E-mail
SDO URL
SDO Contact

SDO acronym (a relational link to the SDO info above)
SDO's Committee/subcommittee/working group
Document title
Document number
Scope/abstract/problem space
Keywords
ICS number/name
Current status (in progress | preliminary approval | final approval)
Project initiation date
Approval date
Referenced standards
Equivalent standards
Superceded standards
Previous versions
Format
Price
Available from



</karl>
=================================================================
Karl F. Best
OASIS - Director, Technical Operations
978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org  http://www.oasis-open.org