[sc34wg3] Analysis of TMRM Use Cases

[Steve Pepper]

Jan,

| I must admit that I am not very familar with the rules within ISO, so the
| following might well be irrelevant, but...
| 
| Personally, I really prefer to contribute to making Topic Maps as good and
| powerful as I am convinced they can be than limiting my thinking to a set
| of existing documents. Especially since these documents leave an immense room
| for interpretation of details anyway.

This doesn't have so much to do with "rules within ISO" as the
purpose of a standard. From a technical point of view I agree
with your desire to make Topic Maps as good and powerful as
possible. But with standards you have to think differently. The
value of a standard, especially an ISO standard, is that you can
*trust in its stability*.

Kal's point, I think, is not that ISO 13250:2000/2003 cannot be
improved, but that it would be wrong, at this stage, to change
the fundamental view of what topic maps are. That will confuse
the market. It could also also scare away people who have already
implemented or adopted the standard and who will no longer feel
that they can trust it.

We have to balance on a knife-edge, fixing things that are quite
obviously broken, but not changing anything fundamental.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)