[SCL] Re: some explanation

[Harry Delugach]

I think conversations today have helped clarify the various points of 
view, both organizationally (as in CL vs. SCL) and technically. Pat can 
accept blame if he wants, but as editor of the ISO standard, I should 
have had these conversations months (or years!) ago. I have been 
operating on hearsay, old information, and suppositions, so I'll 
certainly accept my share of the blame. Now on the work...

As to authorship, ISO standards have no one's name on them except ISO 
and the governing working group and committee identifiers. No 
individuals are identified in the standards -- the copyright belongs to 
ISO itself. ISO makes money selling the standards, but many common 
standards are "freely available" meaning that ISO has agreed they can 
be distributed without fee, as long as documents and copyright notices 
remain intact, etc. It's possible such a decision can be made in the 
case of the CL standard.

The current CL draft is in Pat's hands for a few days more, at which 
time he'll pass it back to me. Then as the editor I'll submit it to the 
ISO process as a committee draft (CD) which can be approved at our SC32 
meeting in Berlin in mid-April. I've observed that it's only after this 
stage that proposed standards get serious scrutiny, so we can plug up 
any holes after that.

The general organization of the standard is to have a body with the 
abstract syntax and semantics of CL, and define what is meant by 
conformance to the standard. Then a series of normative appendices (one 
for XCL, one for KIF and one for CGIF) will describe each concrete 
syntax (inferring that each partakes of the CL semantics). I think it's 
important to demonstrate each one's conformance to the standard, in 
order to serve as validation and as a model for establishing future 
conformance; however, I don't think such demonstrations need to be 
normative. I've proposed separate appendices to show each one's 
conformance as per the body of the standard.

I would feel more comfortable if both Genesereth and Sowa were in 
general agreement with the KIF and CGIF portions of the standard. 
However, I am unwilling to spend more years hammering them out, as John 
points out. In any case, I would like to proceed as quickly as ISO's 
committee procedures can move. Please let me know how or to what degree 
you'd expect or desire to be involved in that process, and we can go 
from there.

Harry