[sc34wg3] www.topicmaps.com (and topicmaps.org)

[Murray Altheim]

Steve Pepper wrote:
> * Murray
> | 
> | You're quite welcome. I would of course be willing to work
> | under the full direction of WG3, and would simply appreciate
> | the committee agreeing beforehand to a means by which I
> | would take such direction, so to avoid any confusion.
> 
> Fine by me. Let's see what Michel has to say.

He has indicated to me in private mail that he's willing to
move this forward so long as I'm in charge of the site. As
you might imagine, the matter is rather sensitive, so I'm
going to be handling it with kid gloves. I need to satisfy
everyone, and I'm going to try.

There will be the matter of hosting site, domain, etc. and
the matter of putting together an initial site so that it
can be reviewed by WG3. I will need to satisfy everyone, so
I hope everyone can have a little patience with me -- I might
not get it right the first time.

> | I expect it will initially be a somewhat iterative process,
> | but we'd soon have the historical record online, with links
> | to the current work, and updated to make more clear the
> | status of *all* the extant documents. This would reduce any
> | confusion people might have over the status of our works.
> 
> I'm OK with this, although we'll need to define what *all*
> means. I don't see any point in preserving every version we
> have in CVS -- only those that were actually distributed and
> discussed by TopicMaps.Org. I alone have about 16 versions
> for the period after Graham and I took over as editors. Many
> of them were only seen by me in between reviews :-)

Yes, that's fine. I think a bit more as a librarian nowadays,
and I wouldn't mind preserving all of those CVS versions, since
they form the entire record. There could be an index of revisions
to everything. OTOH, time and effort are limited, so a first
iteration of the site would be to get the major versions online
and interlinked. I'm happy either way, honestly. If you're willing
to send me a tarball of all of your versions I'll archive them
and then we can let WG3 make a decision on what they'd like to
do. If they decide to put everything up, I'll post them as I'm
able to find the time. (I don't think there's any harm in having
it all online, but I agree it's probably not necessary either.
I've got many, many versions of the XTM DTDs, which would only
be interesting to a technical historian, and I've never met one
of them.)

Good. Good. I think this might work. Everybody use a lot of
hair gel to keep the hackles down a bit and we'll see what
happens... I'm going to forego the asbestos underwear as it
is quite itchy and I don't want any nasty carcinogens anywhere
near my nards (can you say that in public?).

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                          http://www.altheim.com/murray/
Strategic Services Development Manager
The Open University Library and Learning Resources Centre
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

     All you have to do is spend any time around any scientists or
     academics to discover that they all disagree with each other
     and believe that their way of doing it is the only right and
     true way and that nobody else knows anything. -- Neil Gaiman