[SCL] Re: Common Logic status with respect to standards

[John F. Sowa]

Pat,

Just to calm your concerns, I don't believe that ISO or anybody
else will take the Common Logic project away from you and from
people that you know and sometimes trust (or not) such as
Chris, Tanel, Michael, and me.

A much greater danger is that we will be ignored unless we
maintain contact with groups that are better connected with
centers of power (de facto or de jure).  The W3C is a big
de facto power, and ISO is the biggest de jure power.

And as Nancy pointed out, the US Gov't, which is the biggest
economic power around, prefers ISO to any consortium, including
W3C.  So we should keep all of them happy, which I believe we
we can do provided that we do what we are capable of doing:
produce a decent syntax and semantics for CL and one or more
documents that explain it satisfatorily to the audiences that
we need to reach.

> CL seemed to have run into the sand, so (as you know)
> I am slightly concerned that SCL not be directly identified
> with CL.

ISO didn't run it into the sand.  They were waiting for us
to give them a document to review, which we never did.

>Clearly, ISO is a seriously clunky organization....

All organizations are clunky.  And judging from the results
produced by the SCL group so far, it is hard to see any
improvement over anything that ISO does.

> ... I am far more concerned that these insights be adequately
> captured in an SCL exposition than I am in >obtaining
> international consensus: if such consensus is unobtainable
> then I would prefer that the ISO process be aborted.

Genesereth, Gruninger, and I have been talking to the ANSI
and ISO people for over ten years.  They are convinced that
we know logic better than they do and that we could, if we
sat down and produced a document, produce a good one.

The only editing ISO would ask us to do (via Harry) would be
to add the ISO boilerplate on the front and to include the
typical ISO sections for a glossary, references, intro,
scope statement, etc.  All of those sections would be
useful and none of them would in any way modify the syntax
or semantics of CL.

John