[sc34wg3] a new name for the Reference Model

[Mason, James David (MXM)]

I'm still bothered by this whole thread. I don't sense that it's advancing
the work of SC34 or promoting the cause of TMs.

We're still going around what's more meta than what, what must wait on what
for completion.

Let's look at what the military would call "the facts on the ground." The
facts are simple. We have a published standard, ISO/IEC 13250. That's the
one really certain fact. We also have approved projects for several related
things. We have some texts under discussion. Those are much less certain.

The primary fact is the existence of 13250. We can't say that the RM is
something that 13250 must conform to. That's a logical impossibility since
13250 has existed for several years and the RM is just a draft. It's the
other way around. 

Either the RM conforms to 13250, or it's talking about something else that
can't be called TMs. 

We might wish we had started with a better understanding of what TMs are and
written 13250 later, but we can't change the past. 13250 defines TMs.
Period. We can explain it and we can support it. We can extend the
interchange syntaxes (e.g., to RDF, etc.). But 13250 remains the definition
of TMs until we withdraw it or amend it out of utility, in which case we
should withdraw it. And if we withdraw 13250, we'll have to go from talking
about Topic Maps to talking about topic maps.

I say this without consideration of the technical content of either 13250 or
the RM. I am aware of the limitations of what we have in 13250. I am aware
of what the RM and the SAM are trying to do to elucidate 13250. But we can't
have an ISO/IEC standard in existence for some period of time, with people
building software to support it and generating data to be
interchanged/processed by that software, and then come back and say that
there's something else that defines the standard. It's retrogression that
will make us look like idiots.

The RM and the SAM are valuable. But we need to get clear what they are, and
we need to get them done. Quite frankly, we need to send them out for final
ballot very soon. As a TM user (as opposed to a committee officer), I'd like
to see these things done by the May meeting.

Jim Mason

James David Mason, Ph.D.

Y-12 National Security Complex
Bldg. 9113, M.S. 8208
P.O. Box 2009
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-8208 U.S.A.
+1 865 574 6973

Chairman, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34
http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/sc34oldhome.htm