[Standards] URGENT: namespace strings, vote on whether I can forward the proposal to the BoD
Piotr Bański
banski at ids-mannheim.de
Tue Oct 24 22:19:23 CEST 2017
Dear Menzo,
Thanks for sketching a middle-of-the-road approach. I'm sure Andreas can
at least try to give an answer to your question about when a standard
becomes closed, but whatever that point is, I have two remarks:
1. from an early draft stage where, according to your suggestion, the
CSC could perform a review, the standard can evolve quite drastically,
under the influence of the comments in the ballot and directly from
experts on the given committee. Given that, the CSC may end up reviewing
something that won't see the light of day, eventually, because of the
above-mentioned modifications.
2. the general facility for namespace assignment was a generalization of
the immediate attempt to react to the "ISO case"; the "ISO case" was/is
an attempt by Andreas and myself to gain some PR points for CLARIN while
helping out the colleagues at ISO. To be sure: it is _not_ the case that
ISO is drowning and CLARIN holds the only rope and can therefore dictate
conditions. CLARIN would gain more than ISO on this: (a) it would gain
free candy by sticking its name nearly automatically across potentially
several ISO standards, and (b) it would gain a nice showcase for
demonstrating that the proposed general facility for namespace
assignment is attractive and worthwhile for projects to ask for, if ISO
itself has used it. CLARIN +2, ISO +1 (it's not a competition -- I'm
talking in terms of gains on both sides)
If CLARIN says now, "we'll give you a nice string that you can use to
promote us, but on the condition that we become super-reviewers for what
your expert group produces", then, in place of the person in charge on
the side of ISO, my response would be "why thanks a lot, but we're gonna
handle this ourselves, then". End of story, CLARIN +0, ISO +0.
That is why in a previous message, I attempted to draw a distinction
between an expert group on the one hand, where we would only do a
cursory check of the contents of the submitted description for the
resolved web page, and, on the other hand, a more-or-less anonymous
project, where indeed CLARIN should examine whether that project
attempts to win something merely by impressing others with a
clarin.eu-based namespace.
Best regards,
Piotr
On 10/24/17 11:19, Menzo Windhouwer2 wrote:
>
> Hi, Piotr, All,
>
> I also agree that potentially CLARIN can provide a namespace for a
> standard/recommendation/specification/…, that benefits its community,
> but only if there is a chance for the CSC/CLARIN to review the
> standard/recommendation/specification/… to which CLARIN ties its name.
>
> ISO copyright issues might be a problem in the current "SynAF Part 2"
> use case, which needs a more ad hoc decision, but that should be an
> outlier. In general, I expect that namespaces will already be needed
> in the drafts, and it should be possible to make these drafts
> available for review by the CSC/CLARIN. By the time the standard
> cannot be shared anymore its purpose, scope and general (technical)
> shape should be clear enough. Is there a clear stage
>
> https://www.iso.org/stage-codes.html
> <https://www.iso.org/stage-codes.html>
>
> where the draft is reasonably complete, it can still be shared and
> CSC/CLARIN can decide about the namespace? If so that should become
> part of TC37(/SC4)’s standard workflow.
>
> As “CMDI part 2” is to be based on the CLARIN technical CMDI spec [1],
> it would be natural to use a clarin.eu namespace. However, we should
> still make a conscious decision there as in the ISO standardization
> process the CLARIN spec and the ISO standard might diverge …
>
> Best,
>
> Menzo
>
> [1] https://office.clarin.eu/v/CE-2016-0880-CMDI_12_specification.pdf
>
> --
>
> www.meertens.knaw.nl/cms/medewerkers/144709-menzowi
>
> *From: *<standards-bounces at lists.clarin.eu> on behalf of Daan Broeder
> <daan.broeder at meertens.knaw.nl>
> *Date: *Sunday, 22 October 2017 at 12:08
> *To: *Piotr Banski <banski at ids-mannheim.de>
> *Cc: *"standards at lists.clarin.eu" <standards at lists.clarin.eu>
> *Subject: *Re: [Standards] URGENT: namespace strings, vote on whether
> I can forward the proposal to the BoD
>
> 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
>
> ---
>
> Daan Broeder
> Tel. +31 20 4628625
> Daan.broeder at meertens.knaw.nl <mailto:Daan.broeder at meertens.knaw.nl>
> Meertens Instituut (Afdeling Technische Ontwikkeling)
> Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185
> 1012 DK Amsterdam
>
> Postbus 10855
> 1001 EW Amsterdam
>
> ---
>
> 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 potentialclarin.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 theclarin.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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> Standards at lists.clarin.eu <mailto:Standards at lists.clarin.eu>
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>
--
Piotr Bański, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher,
Institut für Deutsche Sprache,
R5 6-13
68-161 Mannheim, Germany
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