Terminology changes for draft specifications.

[Ian Robinson <ian_robinson@uk.ibm.com>]

WSRF-ers,
The new TC process that came into effect on April 15 this year [1] modified
the advancement process for specifications. Per the new process:

   Specifications created by the TC but not yet approved by the TC are
   given a defined name: "Working Draft".
   A TC may by a majority vote of all Voting Members (="Full Majority
   Vote") approve interim drafts as a "Committee Draft", for purposes of
   indicating transitional stability. Committee Drafts will not be
   announced to the public.

The previous TC process had no formal recognition of a TC approved working
draft and so we defined our own local TC process where we used the terms
"editors drafts" for editors work-in-progress and "working drafts" for
interim drafts approved as by the TC. For example, in Nov 2004 and March
2005 we voted on a specific set of "editors drafts" to promote them to
"working drafts" and copy them to the stable "docs.oasis-open.org/wsrf"
archive.

Given the new TC process, we should adopt the new terms such that what we
previously referred to as an "editors draft" should now be referred to as a
"working draft". When we wish to promote a consistent set of working drafts
to the stable archive the TC will be asked to approve the specific working
drafts to become committee drafts. One difference from before is that such
committee drafts require a full majority of the TC rather than a simple
majority (i.e 50% of all voting members rather than 50% of the individual
vote.

One further change for our next set of TC approved drafts: when we
published the "2005/03" drafts in the stable archive I was asked by the
OASIS TC admininstration to refrain, in future, from using a "YYYY/MM"
element in the URL for our artifacts. The OASIS TAB will publish new
artifact naming guidelines soon that suggest that URLs for our committee
drafts should follow a convention so that, for example, the URL
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrf/2005/03/wsrf-WS-Resource-1.2-draft-01.pdf
would become:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrf/wsrf-ws_resource-1.2-spec-cd-01.pdf

The "01" revision would then be the only distinction between one approved
TC draft and the next.

Regards,
Ian

[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php