Re: SUO WG Status
James,
To the best of my knowledge I am not a member of this working group. I am only
here because something I wrote on the related topic of language modelling was
posted.
But as an interested outsider, and trying to keep the superfluous debate to a
minimum, I would just like to comment I think the discussion is germane to
the goals of this working group, to wit, that its goals are not possible.
The situation as it appears to me is that you can have a standard ontology,
and you can have a successful ontology, but you cannot have "successful
standard" ontology. Not if success is going to be measured by practical
applications.
The situation appears to be directly analogous to that of a standard grammar,
which has proven equally elusive.
I think its worth debating that point. I don't know what the protocol is, but
if the starter documents don't address it, I think they should.
Is that admissible, or are the objectives of the working group themselves
beyond discussion?
-Rob
On Sunday 03 April 2005 23:09, James R Schoening wrote:
> All,
>
> As chair of this IEEE working group, I should probably say
> something.
>
> First, current discussions are fine for now, since we don't have
> any feedback on our documents to work on.
>
> Here is my view on the status of this working group.
>
> To develop a successful standard, certain ingredients are needed.
> I would list these as:
>
> a. Charter and organizational structure (We established
> that about 5 years ago)
>
> b. Members (We have quite a few), including technical
> editors with the time to work on the documents.
>
> c. Draft document(s) (We have about 6 documents at
> various stages of maturity)
>
> d. Actual use of the documents (This is what we need
> next.) This surfaces proposed changes, leads to improvements in the
> document, builds consensus in the working group, and can lead to market
> adoption.
>
> e. Consensus. In our case, it means both consensus on
> which document to select, and consensus on the details of that document.
> Market momentum may be needed for this.
>
> f. Market adoption.
>
> Regarding timing, IEEE uses artificial deadlines to spur working
> groups along, and also to dissolve those not making progress. But in
> reality, there is no deadline. The initial deadline is 4-years, which we
> faced last fall, and easily obtained a 2-year extension. If we are
> making good progress by the fall of 2006, we can get further extensions.
> But if not, the charter could be allowed to expire, but this discussion
> list would remain, and we could simply wait to see if any of the starter
> documents gain utilization or market adoption. If progress resumes, we
> request a new charter from IEEE.
>
> The bottom line, in my opinion, is we now need actual utilization
> (by a variety of users) of one or more of our starter documents (and
> feedback from them) to make further progress.
>
> All other opinions welcome.
>
> Jim Schoening
> Chair, SUO WG