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Subject: RE: [legalxml-courtfiling] Tuesday conf call




From: "Scott Came" <scott@justiceintegration.com>
To: TJSmith@ITDecision.com
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:04:37 -0800 (PST)






Unfortunately I will not be able to attend the call tomorrow, but I did
want to share my point of view on this...

Most of our
subcommittee discussions, as best I can recall, have occurred either in
face-to-face meetings of the subcommittee, or teleconferences.� It's not
clear if that kind of interaction is allowed, though it seems silly to
form a subcommittee and then not allow it to meet except via the OASIS
website.� I can't imagine that's what the rule intends.

As far
as workproduct, we have maintained a separate website for our notes and
work-in-progress, with the intent always to assemble those notes into a
formal document representing Blue.� We did this, not to circumvent the
OASIS rules, but to work in an environment that was naturally conducive to
the interlinking of information inherent in our domain.� The nature of our
work is really building a requirements model, not authoring a document.�
In my experience and that of others, doing requirements modeling in a
document-oriented format (e.g., Word) is quite difficult; however, it's
quite easy and natural in html.� Had OASIS provided a medium in which we
could do our modeling easily in html, we absolutely would have used it.

Other technical committees have run into similar issues when
building models (versus authoring documents.)� UML modeling for instance
is pretty much impossible to do using only OASIS-provided tools or the
OASIS website.� On the Integrated Justice TC, we used the GTRI subset
schema generation tool to build our schemas, which again would have been
impossible to do using only OASIS-provided tools.� In these situations, my
understanding is that the typical approach is to perform the modeling in
tools outside the OASIS environment, and then publish the models on a
periodic basis to the OASIS site for TC and/or public review.

As Shane indicated earlier, it was our intent (as discussed at the
September face-to-face) to post a PDF-version of our model to the OASIS
site any time major changes occurred.� Our failure to do so was a simple
oversight that can be corrected.� To wit...

I would like to ask
if it would be satisfactory to publish our work to the OASIS site as a
collection of html documents, zipped together, any time the model
changes.� As for file format, there certainly are other TCs that publish
their material as html (versus word or pdf).� As for process, this really
seems no different than TC work in which a member maintains a copy of a
Word document locally, edits it, and then posts it to the OASIS site.

This proposal certainly seems to satisfy the spirit of the OASIS
rules (the "activities would be publicly and permanently
available") and is also consistent with widespread OASIS TCs'
practice of members authoring content outside the OASIS site (e.g., in
Word on their workstation) as long as that content is published to the
OASIS site as the "official" home.

I respectfully ask
that the TC not require this information to be "flattened" into
a Word document.� That would destroy most of the structure inherent in the
model.

(All of the foregoing is my personal view and opinion,
and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the
requirements subcommittee or any of its members.)

Thanks.
--Scott

> Shane, I think the problem is a little broader
than you can personally
> take
> credit for.  :-)
>
> As I read the OASIS guidelines, all of the SC's
"technical discussions"
> must
> be on OASIS
lists, and all of it's work products in OASIS repositories.
>
> TJS
>
>