RE: [xtm-wg] Promotion of Conceptual Model

["Mason, James (MXM) " <mxm@ornl.gov>]

I want to add my voice to those who are saying both the DTD and the UML
model belong in appendices. And, as one of the people for whom DTD notation
is a whole lot more familiar than UML diagrams, I think you need a good
explanation (more than the two-pager I've seen) of how to read the diagrams.

What's most important, though, is clear prose in the body, explaining how to
assemble use the various parts of an X Topic Map. I wasn't at Swindon or
Dallas, and I've clearly missed a lot. Right now, I get the sense that the
folks who were there are getting carried along on a lot of unwritten
understandings of things that were shared in those meetings. But in just
over two weeks all this is going to have to be presented to a lot of people
who have even less idea of what's going on than I do. At this point, I'd
almost say that it's more important to get down some clear explanation of
what you have designed so far than it is to have all the details worked out
in the model.

I've lived around ISO/IEC 13250 since it got started, and I've read the text
more times than I want to think about. It's all reasonably grammatical, and
taken in local contexts of a paragraph or so, it seems to be clear. But I
can hardly begin to say how hard it is to swallow as a whole (even taking
into account how much HyTime material can be filtered out). I don't mean any
disrespect to Michel, Steve, and Martin, who created something really
significant there. And maybe I'm just a superannuated committee
adminstrator, not a hardcore techie. But I still think that what gets
presented in DC needs to be almost created as much with marketing in mind as
technical purity. That's not to say that it should be a marketing document
or that the technical part doesn't need to be as correct as it can be. But
it needs to be written for poor fools like me who haven't lived, breathed,
and eaten topic maps continuously for three months running.

Good Luck!

Jim Mason

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