2005 INCITS Technical Committee Officers Symposium

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2005 INCITS Technical Committee Officers
Symposium

• Las Vegas, Nevada
• V1 Text Processing Office and Publishing Systems
  Interface
• Patrick Durusau, Chair

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1. TC Scope

• V1 is the U.S. TAG to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 and
  provides recommendations on U.S. positions to the
  JTC 1 TAG.
• Prominent projects in SC 34 include
• Document Semantics and Description Language
  (DSDL, better known as RELAX-NG) in WG1
• Font and rendering standards in WG2
• Topic Maps and related standards in WG3

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2. Significant Accomplishments

• Added two new members (4 to 6)
• Established regular teleconference meetings
• Participated in development of a proposal for
  standard voting system for technical committees
• Prepared a proposal for value-added standards
  products using ISO standards (now being developed
  for submission to JTC 1)

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3. Significant Challenges

• Membership and visibility were and continue to be
  the major challenges
• V1 has a number of gifted individuals and
  significant corporate members but far fewer than
  its activities warrant
• Active solicitation of new members and greater
  publicity concerning V1s role in emerging
  standards were seen as appropriate responses

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4. Expected Challenges

• Membership and visibility for V1 are the greatest
  challenges
• Membership can be addressed in part by
  demonstrating benefits from participation in V1
• Visibility for V1 can be addressed by greater use
  of ISO standards as part of the ISO process (as
  opposed to HTML and PDF, neither of which are
  based on ISO standards)

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5. Liaison Activities

• The International SGML Users Group (ISUG)
  regularly sends delegations to SC 34 meetings
• A liaison is maintained with TC 184/SC 4 on that
  SCs efforts to harmonize SGML and STEP/EXPRESS
  standards
• V1 had a liaison with the World Wide Web
  Consortium, W3C, but that liaison has lapsed

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6. Future Trends and Related Technical Activities

• RELAX-NG (DSDL) is used both in ISO and the W3C
  (in preference to XSD) and is the XML schema
  specification of choice
• Topic Maps are emerging as the answer to
  meaningful merging of diverse data resources
• Conversations are underway with potential members
  such as Lexis/Nexis, who are interested in the
  topic maps work of V1 (a membership of
  Lexis/Nexis would provide validation of V1
  membership for similar information vendors)
• V1 will be sending delegates to the WG 3 meeting
  in Montreal in August, 2005 and to Atlanta for
  the SC 34 plenary in December, 2005.

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7. How Can We Help?

• Develop a publicly visible voting system for TCs
• Use ISO standards both internally and to power
  the INCITS website (demonstrates faith in the
  standards)
• Develop membership materials that emphasize the
  payoff from INCITS membership