FW: [chairs] RDDL / RSS and simplifying "busy work" for spec' editors / staff?

Here is an idea about simplifying maintenance of the 
status metadata of specifications. I thought you may be interested in 
this.

 

Personally, I am not sure how decoupling the status 
information helps in solving the problem. Perhaps I have not misunderstood the 
problem itself!

 

-- Sanjay

From: David RR Webber (XML) 
[mailto:] 
Sent: Wednesday, Apr 04, 2007 9:46 
AM
To: 
Subject: [chairs] RDDL / 
RSS and simplifying "busy work" for spec' editors / staff?

Folks,

 

Like all of us involved in moving spec's through the process - I'm 
constantly wanting the mechanics to be easier to facilitate and the burden on 
the OASIS supporting staff to be lessened - while retaining the rigour 
needed.

 

It seems that the new IPR changes have introduced a doubling up on the 
number of steps to go through - and hence potential revisions of 
documents.

 

I'm wondering if we can de-couple the actual status of the specification 
from the specification documents and schemas themselves by referencing to a 
central status tracker instead?

 

This would therefore reduce the continual editing of each item - just to 
update the status indicator.  That editing also adds 
confusion factor - because every document appears to change at each 
step even if no substantive changes were actually done.

 

One candidate for the tracker is the RDDL - another would be to create an 
RSS document - that tracks the status of the specification of each TC centrally, 
and locally on each TC page.  The RSS would have the side benefit of 
allowing subscription to that to do notifications of changes.

 

Either way the RDDL and RSS could be directly linked on the Kavi TC page as 
a "Status" link that would be clickable along with the other standard 
links.  That linkage would be noted on the title page of the specification 
and in-line in schemas - something like http://status.oasis-open.org/tcabbrev 
.

 

Thanks, DW

"The way to be is to do" - Confucius (551-472 
B.C.)