Re: [xtm-wg] New language.xtm and country.xtm proposals

[Murray Altheim <murray.altheim@sun.com>]

Kal Ahmed wrote:
> 
> Holger wrote:
> 
> > Hi Lars Marius,
> >
> > Thanks for this valuable work. I hope we could approve both
> > in Montréal.

I know I've already done my complaining about the idea of having two
sets of language and country topic maps to deal with, and consider it
really poor form to create a competition where none need exist. But
since Lars Marius is as he says "willing to risk" the downside of that,
the group must now decide between the ones I've authored and these
new ones. 

Since my revised language and country topic maps do everything that
Lars Marius' does (as far as I can see), also maps in the UN and
MARC codes, and doesn't do things I disagree with (such as remove
the necessary 'xml:base' attribute or make the XTM DTD URI absolute,
which will just cause parsing headaches), I will of course vote against
approval. This all seems pretty stupid as a "process" though. Do I
now have to expect that someone will duplicate everything else I'm
doing? I don't consider this "competition in the marketplace," nor
do I appreciate what should be a cooperative venture in a standards
activity being turned into a competition. Lars Marius has justified 
this as his requirement on getting the work done before Montreal, but
I don't buy the justification. I've already stated that he can use
the PSIs established by the current topic maps, as they are opaque
containers for those PSIs. 

Put it this way: I've put *many* hours into preparing the updates to
the languages and countries topic maps. They will be ready and delivered
to the group when it begins to discuss this issue. I will *certainly*
vote against using someone else's versions on principle. And should
the group vote to use someone else's, I would be pretty pissed off. 
Is this how we should be working cooperatively together under our new
organization? Is this how our process and activity should be run? I
hope not, as I'd certainly reconsider how much time and commitment I'd
put into such an activity in the future. We either work together or we
fail. And as I've said, I don't consider this announcement very productive
towards regaining any trust amongst a group whose trust is at a low
point. I am strongly against spending the time on this prior to having
some process under which we can mediate disagreement. And I disagree
strongly with many of the decisions made in these new topic maps. Very
strongly, both from lexical, syntactic and semantic standpoints.

But as he says, he's willing to risk it.

[...]
> I wasn't present at the Austin meeting, but in looking at these proposed
> topic maps, I would be of the opinion that the topics are surrogates for
> countries and languages. It is the names that *are* the two and three letter
> code (as well as the English and French names), but the topics are suitable
> surrogates for countries and languages, and those codes are *used as*
> subject indicators, but IMHO the subject being indicated is the
> country/language in question.

This is precisely how the ISO codes are described and used, and the
current language and country topic maps were authored with the same
idea in mind. There is no need to break with this tradition, because
use of a surrogate for a language or country is all you can do anyway.



Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         <mailto:murray.altheim&#x40;sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu

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