From owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org Sun Jul 1 14:04:02 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:31:36 -0700 From: Patrick Durusau Subject: INCITS-V1: Looking post US position on DIS 29500 Sender: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org To: Incits-V1 Reply-to: incits-v1@incits-v1.org X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-ASG-Debug-ID: 1183321903-0765005a0000-E618Iy X-Barracuda-URL: http://10.10.100.8:8000/cgi-bin/mark.cgi X-Barracuda-Connect: unknown[66.110.197.207] X-Barracuda-Start-Time: 1183321903 X-ASG-Whitelist: Client X-ASG-Orig-Subj: Looking post US position on DIS 29500 X-Barracuda-Virus-Scanned: by Barracuda Spam Firewall at insimail.com Greetings! I deeply appreciate all the interest in V1 on the DIS 29500 proposal and hope that many of our new members will be interested in other ongoing work in SC 34, for which V1 is the mirror committee. Be aware that V1 can originate and work on work of its own choosing as well, which can become an ANSI standard or even be submitted to ISO to become an ISO standard. One topic in particular that is of interest to me is a standard for *transposition* between different document formats. Note that I did *not* say a "mapping" between different formats. I find that the term "mapping" is taken too literally in general by the XML community. While it is true that element to element mapping is one definition of "mapping," it is a very limited one. But, to avoid that confusion, I would like to use the term *transposition,* which in one online dictionary is defined as: "To put into a different place or order." Since in the long run we will be facing questions concerning UOF (Unified Office Format from China), PDF, etc., I think starting an investigation of what it would take to write a standard for transposition would be a very useful task for V1. A standard for transposition would not (I hope) require any particular representation or methodology for transposition but would merely note the requirements for a transposition. For example, if one is transposing a in OOXML, what information must be represented in the format to which it will be transposed to offer round tripping back to OOXML? And to the extent that we investigate different formats we can offer non-normative suggestions for those transpositions. When I think about a transposition standard I see it as something different than saying: See the standard in question. Rather than focusing on the accidents of syntax a transposition standard would focus on the information and relationships between the information without regard to its syntactic representation. For example, if we were writing about runs in OOXML, we might have a note that describes the syntax but what is really important is that it delimits some string of text with the following properties ...., and may have revision information ...., etc. Doesn't really have to say anything about how that would be represented in the transposed syntax or even in the original syntax. By isolating those properties, hopefully using a standard nomenclature, then other formats could be expressed in the same way, which would enable both cleaner transpositions as well as isolating cases where transposition isn't easy or perhaps even possible. It would be a non-trivial exercise but one that I think would be of lasting benefit to the users of many different formats. Hope everyone is having a great weekend! Patrick -- Patrick Durusau patrick@durusau.net Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34 Acting Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps) Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps) Co-Editor, OpenDocument Format (OASIS, ISO/IEC 26300)