Re: [xtm-wg] Fixing language.xtm and country.xtm

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* James David Mason
|
| What this group (no matter what its current name is or how it's
| chartered or under whose auspices it's running) has come up against
| is a problem that we ran into long ago in ISO: the need for
| registration authorities.

Well, do we actually need a registration authority? The problem with
those is that you need to run a central bureaucracy able to scale with
the use of the RA, and that it raises the bar for defining PSIs.

The web/internet way of doing things is to avoid RAs as far as
possible, and I guess that would make sense in this case as well.

What problems do you think an RA would solve, that doing without an RA
would land us in? 

| UNICODE/ISO 10646 is just a list of coded characters. That is, it
| just deals with bit combinations (or hex representations
| . . .). Althought the published versions of the standard show
| printable characters associated with the bit combinations, those
| actually aren't standardized.

This is actually not correct. Unicode is actually a large database
with information about every character such as names, case mappings,
category information, joining behaviour, directionality, mirroring,
decompositions, and so on.

| There are some PSIs attached to XTM that really need to be online in
| a fixed place (we don't want the typical XML Namespace dead URI
| problem). Those PSIs are even more fundamental than country.xtm and
| language.xtm. They really need to be in a PERMANENT place. One idea
| that has been suggested is that they need PURLs, and the place for
| PURLs is, of course, OCLC.

Actually, I disagree that the PSIs need to be online. The PSIs are
URIs, not resources, so what they resolve to is immaterial. The
document that defines them needs to be online and permanent, but the
URIs that are the PSIs have no such needs. The URIs, as defined by the
document, are stable, no matter what they do or do not resolve to.
 
| Actually we need two things: (1) a standard to provide for the RA
| and (2) the RA itself. Item 1 is appropriate work for SC34 (those of
| you who work in SC34, start thinking about it!); Item 2 might be
| something OASIS could do.

If we do agree that we want an RA this sounds sensible to me.

--Lars M.


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