[SCL] Continuation

[John F. Sowa]

Chris,

I would like to report some discussions with Nancy Lawler at
the ICCS conference in Dresden at the end of July.  Following
are the major points:

  1. Government agencies want reliable standards for any
     contracts or projects that they support.  And they
     regard ISO standards as the most reliable, ANSI as
     a step down from ISO, and consortia (e.g., W3C or OMG)
     as a very big step down from ANSI.  That doesn't mean
     that W3C support is bad.  But it does mean that ISO
     support is far more important.

  2. Nancy very much wants to see an ISO standard for CL
     along the lines that we (you, Pat, and me) proposed
     in Santa Fe in January, and which are documented in
     the following slides (which I prepared with contributions
     from you and Pat and which you, Pat, and Nancy approved
     before I presented them to the ISO working group):

     http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/clprop.htm

  3. Nancy is an official coeditor of the ISO 11179 Metadata
     standard, and she very much wants to get Common Logic
     written in as an official standard for representing
     metadata.  But she needs to get an official companion
     project on CL supported by ISO.

  4. The ISO group in January was very supportive of the
     proposal I presented, but they have been disappointed
     that nobody has stepped forward to be the official ISO
     editor of the CL document.  In January, we discussed
     the possibility that you (Chris) might join INCITS T2
     in order to be an official member of the US TAG to the
     ISO committee.  But so far, that has not happened.

  5. Nancy said that she would be willing to guide the CL
     standard through ISO, but for political reasons, it would
     be better to have someone with an email domain other
     than nsa.gov to be the official editor.  Harry Delugach,
     who has been participating in the ICCS conferences from
     the beginning (and who will host the next one in 2004),
     volunteered to join INCITS T2 and to be the titular
     editor of the ISO version of the CL standard (and he
     would be more than happy to defer to you, if you would
     care to join).  But in any case, Harry could be the
     poster child for the ISO version, if nobody else steps
     forward.  The technical material of the ISO version
     should be identical to the version you are editing,
     and the only difference would be the cover sheet and
     introductory boilerplate.

  6. The next ISO meeting will be in Melbourne, Australia,
     in October.  Nancy is planning to go, and she would like
     to present a draft of the CL standard in a form that
     will convince the ISO committee that progress is being
     made.  It is not clear whether Harry will get the funding
     to go, but Nancy would also like to say that there is
     an official editor for the project, who is a member of
     INCITS T2 -- and that could be Harry.

Meanwhile, I have been tied up with some business for VivoMind,
which has a deadline of Sept. 19.  After that, I plan to devote
my sole attention to bringing the CG part of the CL standard
up to the level that would make us happy.

How do these issues fit in with your plans?

John