Re: P&P: RE: Fw: SUO: Motion to Adopt Standard Upper Ontology Working Group Development Guidelines, Version 1.0 D5

[Frank Farance <frank@farance.com>]

Matthew-

I am strongly opposed to your procedures document because it re-invents terminology and parts of the standards process -- and it re-invents them imprecisely, which is of little good to us.  I believe you are a participant of ISO TC184, yet I would have expected that your documents regarding the standards process would have used ISO "standards terminology" (e.g., ISO/IEC Directives, ISO/IEC Guide 2, etc.) rather than using the Oxford English Dictionary (<-- good for lay people, poor for technical definitions).  For example, the terms "conformance", "defect", "definition", "example", "formal issue", "informative", "normative", "principle", and "term" are all defined in ISO sources or have their ISO equivalents (e.g., "formal issue" would be a line-item on the ISO comment form, which is part of comment resolution, which may be part of ballot resolution).

Regarding the notion of "principles", standards have a notion of "provisions" (requirement, recommendation, statement, instruction).  We should simply use what already exists.  The wording in Clause 4 appears to be either recommendations or statments -- my guess is that you intend for "recommendations" since there are no "requirements" in Clause 4.

Regarding Clause 5, the work programme for this working group is clearly defined: currently, we have 1 PAR (project) outstanding <-- that is our work programme.  If we want more projects, we need to request them (I haven't seen any requests for additional projects).

Regarding subclause 5.2 and 5.3, the so-called "deliverable" is what IEEE calls a "standard", "recommendation", or "guideline" <-- a formal result of a unit of the work programme (project == unit of work programme).

So I suggest we postpone discussion of your procedures document until you can tell us how we make progress on the work we a required to do.

Regarding Clause 6, for international and national standards, your concerns about "an untrue statement, an unclear, ambiguous or misleading statement, something missing that is necessary" aren't the proper criteria for issues.  The criteria for issues is: text that causes the lack of consensus (regardless of reason).  As an example, certain standards wording is purposely ambiguous (e.g., it permits a range of implementations) and other kinds of standards wording purposely have features where "something missing that is necessary" (<- this is known as "implementation-defined").  So I believe this criteria is incorrect.

Regarding Annex 3, the split between "normative" and "informative" is inaccurate -- whole clauses and subclauses can be informative.

If your notion of "deliverable" means "project" in the IEEE sense, then your process has re-invented the IEEE process.  If your notion of "deliverable" does not mean "project" in the IEEE sense, then it is unclear how you "devlierable" actually relates to the P1600.01 project this is established -- i.e., this is all nice discussion, but the purpose of IEEE Working Groups is to produce standards, not just facilatate discussion.

As you can see, I believe there are major problems with your document -- and I find the document unnecessary because we already have a document for the IEEE standards development process.

-FF

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