Re: [ubl] Transition Statement

Stig,

 

I just wanted to add for your consideration the following:

 

I agree with you that open use of content standards can be at odds with 
standards development organizations (SDO) publishing policies. I also agree that 
the SDO process, because it is fair and open, can also be tedious and time 
consuming making "keeping up with the times" difficult.

 

1) That being said, there is a great deal of activity in ANSI, ASHRAE in 
North America, and, in IEC for the recognition that content standards in 
the form of XMLSchema, for example, need to handled in a new way.

 

I have been directly involved in ANSI C12.19, a communications data model 
for electricity metering. In that effort, the standards group provided that 
while the standards document itself would be constrained by the conventional 
copyright means, the data model in the form of schema would be restricted only 
by copyright for the purpose of configuration management and version, and 
without economic strings.

 

I am aware of similar activities in ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, 
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers). ASHRAE is an SDO under the 
umbrella of ANSI on behalf of SDOs in the United States.

 

2) The fact change is not frequent with SDOs provides a key rationale for 
such content standards to have a very explicit plan for change management -- 
this includes versioning, and, importantly user extensibility. 

 

Versioning is of course essential to know what you actually have. 
Extensibility serves two purposes -- allowing the marketplace to accommodate 
change gracefully through collaborative but explicit extensions; and; providing 
a robust environment to discover valuable candidates for standardized extensions 
in future versions of the standard.

 

Cheers,

Marty 

 

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