[Standards] URGENT: namespace strings, vote on whether I can forward the proposal to the BoD

Sun Oct 22 12:07:51 CEST 2017

Dear Piotr, all.

I think it’s fine if CLARIN would share its namespace with a standard agency as ISO, but should (as you suggest) keep control on what ends-up there.
That ‘control’ should I hope not take much of the CSC's time, it should not act as a second review pannel, it has, in the CLARIN context, far more urgent things to do. (On that subject I was hoping that the first CSC messages after Budapest would have been concerned with more practical challenges wrt. interoperability and formats. But I understand the window of opportunity aspect.)

g.
daan

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Daan Broeder
Tel. +31 20 4628625
Daan.broeder at meertens.knaw.nl<mailto:Daan.broeder at meertens.knaw.nl>
Meertens Instituut (Afdeling Technische Ontwikkeling)
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On 21 Oct 2017, at 00:37, Piotr Banski <banski at ids-mannheim.de<mailto:banski at ids-mannheim.de>> wrote:

Dear Dieter,

Thanks for the quick reaction, and especially for a possible interpretation of your question that you surely didn't intend, but that made me reflect on the possible strategies of the CSC towards the "requesting agencies" in cases like the hopefully upcoming one concerning ISO. Maybe we can come up with a sensible policy together.

In the first step, let me shove ISO aside, because the ballot I'm asking for right now does not concern ISO (although the direct motivation for my message came from what happened in a DIN telco). It concerns the general policy of whether we want to have a mechanism by which CLARIN regulates the use of "clarin.eu<http://clarin.eu>"-based namespace strings.

(first remark: if I said "allow" anywhere before, I think we should replace that word with "regulate", because I don't think that this is a matter of _permission_ unless "CLARIN" is a registered trademark and there is a battery of lawyers ready to be paid for fighting to enforce that trademark in obscure namespace strings; "regulate" would work great especially in connection with a policy that requires an informative web page to be associated with the requested namespace URI)

In the second step, I am now wondering if we should by policy distinguish between (a) expert bodies such as ISO committees, and especially a committee with which a formal liaison exists, hence an implied measure of trust that precludes the CSC from playing a role of a potential bottleneck in the ISO process, and (b) "other bodies", where we might actually be entitled or maybe even expected to play an expert role. I'm wondering if such a distinction should be made formally, or rather come up in the discussion of individual cases, as in:

Case (a):
reporter: "TC37SC4 has requested a new namespace, with the postfix 'maf/n1'"
committee: "have they submitted text for the corresponding web page? is it readable? if so, proceed"

Case (b):
reporter: "Project XY has requested a namespace for their XML vocabulary, with the postfix 'xy/fluff/n1'"
committee: "What is Project XY? What centre is it located in? Let's have a look at their suggested info text, let's have a look at the project, and then decide"

It seems to me that leaving this kind of issues for discussion might be a friendlier, and first of all, a more flexible strategy than categorizing the "requesting agencies" into "expert bodies" and "non-expert bodies", because I am sure we could stumble upon cases where even an act of such pre-categorization could unnecessarily cause bad blood.

I would love to know the members' thoughts on that.

---------------------
I shoved ISO aside at first, and now I'm reaching into my hat again to pull it back out and address the question on whether the CSC can look at the specification that urgently needs a new namespace. The answer is, to my mind, standard: ISO documents at late stages in the ISO process can only be shared within the ISO committee where they were produced or its national mirror committees. When preparing the liaison between CLARIN-ERIC and ISO TC37SC4, Andreas Witt tried to bargain for a modification of this rule, but as far as I recall, there was no way to change this within category-A liaison. Now that I'm looking at the relevant section of ISO directives [1], I am wondering what the beautifully vague statement that "Technical committees and subcommittees shall seek the full and, if possible, formal backing of the organizations having liaison status for each document in which the latter is interested" can possibly entail. I don't think this is an escape hatch (or a hidden lever), but maybe Andreas can shed more light on this, at some point. For practical purposes, however, it would seem strange to me if we were to in a way challenge ISO to give up its principles for the sake of a namespace string in a standard produced by one subcommittee. In my glass ball, I see ISO shrugging this request away and allowing the standard to drop from the publication process -- we wouldn't be hitting ISO but rather SC4 experts, whose work would simply turn out to have been in vain.

The SC4 specification that is for sure affected by the namespace issue is "SynAF Part 2" a.k.a "the standard formerly known as ISO Tiger" [2], which would probably be in print right now if not for this last-minute hiccup. Another proposed standard that may be at some point subject to this predicament is... CMDI part 2 [3], and Thorsten Trippel would surely be able to say if this particular item would need a CLARIN-based namespace -- but even if it doesn't require one, what's important is that some of the affected specifications are or may be rather important to CLARIN itself, so we certainly want to be accommodating and flexible here, rather than risk creating a bottleneck.

Apologies for this lengthy reply to a short question :-) But I felt that there was a need to tease two things apart at first, and that a space was opening for a policy discussion concerning the potential regulatory role of the CSC in the namespace business.

Best regards,

   Piotr

[1]: http://www.iso.org/sites/directives/directives.html#Section-sec_1.17.5
[2]: https://www.iso.org/standard/62491.html
[3]: https://www.iso.org/standard/64579.html

On 20/10/17 18:11, Dieter Van Uytvanck wrote:

On 20/10/2017 17:12, Piotr Banski wrote:

the need for potential clarin.eu<http://clarin.eu>-based namespace strings has become very
urgent and the ISO process will automatically delete the standards in
question (among them SynAF part 2, up till recently called "ISO Tiger"
but now rebranded not to use the "ISO" in the name)

Thank you for this proposal Piotr. Can you tell us where we can find a
copy of the standard specification or proposal? Would be nice to know in
detail to which standard we are assigning the clarin.eu<http://clarin.eu> namespace.

best,

--
Piotr Bański, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher,
Institut für Deutsche Sprache,
R5 6-13
68-161 Mannheim, Germany

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