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Dear all,
Sorry for jumping in so late in the
discussion.
Frank: the agenda item at the JTC 1 Plenary is
14.10 (see Document JTC1 N6889).
The rational for tabling those documents at the JTC
1 Plenary is explained in JTC 1 N68771.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you want to
discuss further.
I will be leaving for Sophia Antipolis late on the
17th, arriving to my hotel (the Hotel Mercure Sophia Antipolis) on the 18th in
the middle of the afternoon. We could meet before the
Plenary.
Regards,
François
-----------
François
Coallier
Professeur / Professor
Département de génie électrique /
Department of Electrical Engineering
École de technologie supérieure
1100,
rue Notre-Dame Ouest
Montréal, Québec
Canada H3C 1K3
Tel. +1 514 396
8637
Fax. +1 514 396 8684
fcoallier@ele.etsmtl.ca
Président/Chairman
ISO/IEC
JTC 1/SC7 - Software and System Engineering
chair@jtc1-sc7.org
www.jtc1-sc7.org
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 11:23
AM
Subject: [stdsreg] RE: FW:
if10-11A_Standsmetadata spec
Dear Frank
I have not seen any further enlightenment
from Stds Reg colleagues, but the final limited information I have is that
this was being organized by one François Coailler (can't even give you his
e-mail....). I imagine he will do the presentation to JTC1.
I'm
sure that the comments you have made already will be a valuable input into the
process. Speaking again as a non-technician, but one having to talk to
"end-users", including conventional industries who are left completely
nonplussed, anything however small that we can do to facilitate
comparison/contrasting (by humans) of work item data from standards bodies (in
the broadest sense) must be a considerable advance. You must be correct
that in practice much more detail would be needed to resolve
interoperability/overlap issues, but on the other hand anything would be
better than the current state of the art (even to describe the bodies
themselves in a consistent way!).
Best regards
John Ketchell
Director, CEN/ISSS - Information Society Standardization System
URL:http://www.cenorm.be/isss
Rue
de Stassart, 36
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium
email (direct) john.ketchell@cenorm.be
email
(secretariat) isss@cenorm.be
Tel
(direct) + 32 2 550 08 46
Tel (secretariat) + 32 2 550 08 13
Fax + 32
2 550 09 66
Tel (GSM) +32 75 594 828
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Farance
[mailto:frank@farance.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2002 2:36 PM
To:
Ketchell John; Frank Farance; Lisa Rajchel; Boyd James
Cc: Doug Mann; Larry
Fitzwater; Dan Gillman; Bruce Bargmeyer; stdsreg; karl.best@oasis-open.org
Subject:
RE: FW: if10-11A_Standsmetadata spec
At 12:02 2002-10-08 +0200,
Ketchell John wrote:
> Dear Frank
>
> Thank you for this
message, which James forwarded me. In the Stds Reg Committee we did have
some information on ISO 11179, though whether this was fully up to date I am
not expert enough to say.
>
> You might like to note that the
original ideas were presented to the JTC1 Business Planning Group, and that
the draft spec. will be presented to the November JTC1 Plenary.
Standards Registry participants (in copy) can enlighten further (almost) to
close the loop.
I'll be at the JTC1 Plenary in two weeks.
Which plenary agenda item will it be presented? (7.1.3 on long-term JTC1
Business Planning?) Who will make the presentation?
FYI, I
reviewed the Karl Best's (Oasis Technical Director) presentation on a
Standards Registry at:
http://www.omg.org/interop/presentations/Standards_Registry.pdf
In
the mid to late 1990's, the JTC1/GII (Global Information Infrastructure)
activities reviewed JTC1's existing projects (see "http://ssdo.org/jtc1/gii-roadmap")
and catalogued them. Although there is a diagram in this document, it
doesn't represent any particular architecture. In fact the diagram
merely says: (1) there are some GII technologies of interest (the middle
layer), (2) some people want to use these technologies (the top layer), (3)
the GII technologies themselves are dependent upon lower technologies (the
lower layer).
In Karl Best's presentation he hopes that a registry will
help reduce duplicated efforts. And he also points to the impossible
problem of creating a taxonomy. In my opinion (and in my experience in
liaising among multiple technical activities), only knowing about projects (no
matter how detailed) is too coarse granularity -- one needs finer
granularity. One needs a *human* to interpret and understand this kind
of information.
It is difficult to *interpret* these finer grain items
(or any items) in the context of what is actually useful to *you* (i.e., the
user of the standards registry). For example, if one were to catalog
IETF's RFCs, many RFCs would be related to layer 5 services (e.g., SNMP, SMTP,
HTTP, FTP, TELNET, etc.). Likewise, one can look at all the XML-related
specs and discover: they are XML "coding bindings of some data model".
But how useful is it to know about yet another session protocol, or yet
another XML binding?
Another document I'd like to point you to is a
document I wrote in 1996 regarding the GII and the inability to produce a
"common global architecture". At the time, we had the best engineers and
architecture in the world working on the project, yet we failed in our goal to
produce a "common global architecture". I was curious why we failed, so
I spend a good amount of time analyzing the reasons for our failure. I
wrote a paper on the topic called "Choosing an Architecture for the
GII":
http://farance.com/standards/gii-arch-issues.html
I
believe this paper of 1996 is still relevant today -- and relevant in many
ways. You might find chapter 8 (Applications, Middleware, Bitways)
interesting because it relates to the notion of "web services" today (the
terminology has changed in 6 years, but the concepts are very similar).
In chapter 8, I point out that these kind of architectures ultimately
say:
"I'm an industry that
has to talk to other industries"
which is not (unfortunately) a
particularly revealing summary of many of the powerpoint presentations that
I've viewed over time. In other words, after reading the above paper,
the reader might conclude that many of the high level "stack diagrams"
(layering diagrams) provide little real engineering insight (i.e., it is hard
to transform them into real interoperability) and there are significant
technical and political problems in gaining wider industry adoption with
"stack diagrams" that do have engineering insight *and* significant
scope.
Regardless, it looks like we have some overlapping technical
work on this standards description and I look forward to meeting you or your
representative at the JTC1 Plenary. Hopefully, we can share some
experiences.
-FF
_______________________________________________________________________
Frank
Farance, Farance Inc. T: +1 212 486 4700
F: +1 212 759 1605
mailto:frank@farance.com
http://farance.com
Standards, products,
services for the Global Information
Infrastructure
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