[sc34wg3] a new name for the RM

[Mason, James David (MXM)]

I wear more than one hat. As the president of ISUG I want to publicize any
good practice that involves structured markup. That's one of the main
reasons ISUG exists, why we run a journal. We're looking for articles all
the time, and I'm always looking for more TM articles.

But given that ISUG, IDEAlliance, XML.com, and lots of others are out there
publishing things about markup, there's less of a burden on SC34 to do the
publicity now than there was 15 or 20 years ago when we got into this
business.

SC34's job is primarily to see that the specifications are right, that they
are concise and readable, so that we and others can turn around and write
articles and read papers in those other fora. As a member of SC34/WG3 (and
as SC34 chairman) I want to make sure our scarce resources within the
committee are concentrated on the standards.

Certainly the ODA people never had a user community. They thought of users
only as consumers of the standards. Even at the height of the SGML/ODA wars,
we had the advantage over them because we had GCA and ISUG out there
promoting our message among end users.

So when I'm wearing my SC34 hat, all I want to say is, "Get your specs
done." Then I turn around and put on an ISUG hat and say, "Write us some
articles for the InterChange."

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Bryan [mailto:mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 3:10 AM
To: sc34wg3@isotopicmaps.org
Subject: Re: [sc34wg3] a new name for the RM


Jim

>From chair of the International XML/SGML Users Group I'm surprised to be
told:

>Our duty is to both end users and implementers, but primarily
>to implementers. We are to interpret the needs of end users and then
>instruct the implementers, through standards, how best to meet the users'
>needs.
>
> Explaining to the users how we went about this is only minimally part of
our
> charter. Without the users, we have no justification for having a
committee,
> but training the users is more a function for IDEAlliance conferences and
> publications in the open literature than it is something we have to do
> inside SC34 and its publications.

The big difference between SGML and ODA is that SGML had a real user
community that asked our legally oriented formal language techie "what the
hell do you mean by ...." to try to understand the gobbledegook that was the
formal definitions. Even then the formal definitions had to have
(un)explanatory text.

Unless we sell the basic concept of topic maps to users there is no point at
all in producing tools for creating or viewing topic maps. It doesn't matter
a hoot how technically sound the standard is if users cannot understand how
to use topic maps in real world scenarios. As you rightly point out:

"Without the users, we have no justification for having a committee"

While I agree that producing training material is outside the scope of SC34
the fact is that we still need to train the trainers, and they need
documentation to back up their statements. Simply publishing a formal
definition, a la ODA, is the way to kill the standard. At the very least we
need examples of the good use of realistic topic maps that can be talked
through.

Martin

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