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Standards Committee Activities 2010-2011

Standards Committee Presentation at ASIST 2010

"Linked Data –Enabling Standards and Other Approaches"

Abstract:

The ASIST Standards Committee has been organizing standards updates sessions at each ASIST annual conference. The purpose is to promote the awareness of standards issues by major standards bodies including ISO, NISO, and W3C. Meanwhile, the sessions usually bring in a focused panel to address an array of important issues around standards and applications in which the ASIST community would be interested. At the 20101 Annual Meeting the panel was about standards and alternative approaches enabling representing and disseminating data as linked data. Standards covered include the second edition of Web Ontology Language (OWL2) of the W3C, activities of ISO /IEC JTC 1/SC 34 (for Document Description and Processing Languages standards related to structured markup languages), projects at ISO TC46/SC9 (Identification and description), W3C’s RDFa which is actively being refined and has generated significant fresh usage activities, and NISO I2 (Institutional Identifiers).

Presntations:

  1. Gail Hodge:
    Introduction.
  2. Sam Oh: Linked
    Data and Identifiers
    . (ISO TC46/SC9 (Identification and Description
    activities updates; the second edition of Web Ontology Language (OWL2))
  3. Jon Phipps: SKOS:
    A W3C Recommendation
    .
  4. Ed Summers: RDFa — Linked
    Data on the Web We Have. (external
    link)
  5. Mark Needleman and Jody
    DeRidder: NISO I2 (Institutional Identifiers)
  6. Marcia Zeng, Jon Phipps, and Ed Summers: Introducing
    W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group (LLD XG)

(Last Updated March 20, 2012)

  1. Voted YES on a Reaffirmation of ANSI/NISO Z39.87-2006 Data Dictionary –
    Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images
  2. Voted YES to Revise ISO 21127:2006 A Reference Ontology for the Interchange of Cultural Heritage Information
  3. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 28650-1 Information and Documentation X RFID in Libraries Part 1: Data Elements and General Guidelines for Implementation – with the comment that the standard does not provide as much details on patron privacy as desired (comment provided by Timothy Dickey)
  4. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 28650-2 Information and Documentation X RFID in Libraries Part 2: Encoding of RFID Data Elements Based on Rules from ISO/IEC 15962
  5. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 28650-3 Information and Documentation X RFID in Libraries Part 3: Fixed Length Encoding
  6. Submited the following votes on ISO TC46 Transiliteration Standards:
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 9:1995 Information and documentation — Transliteration of Cyrillic characters into Latin characters – Slavic and non-Slavic languages
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO 233:1984 Documentation — Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO 233-2:1993 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters –
      Part 2: Arabic language — Simplified transliteration
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 233-3:1999 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters –
      Part 3: Persian language — Simplified transliteration
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 259:1984 Documentation — Transliteration of Hebrew characters into Latin characters
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 259-2:1994 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Hebrew characters into Latin characters —
      Part 2: Simplified transliteration
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 843:1997 Information and documentation —Conversion of Greek characters into Latin characters
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO 3602:1989 Documentation — Romanization of Japanese (kana script)
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO 7098:1991 Information and documentation — Romanization of Chinese
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 9984:1996 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 9985:1996 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Armenian characters into Latin characters
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO 11940:1998 Information and documentation — Transliteration of Thai
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO 11940-2:2007 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Thai characters into Latin characters —
      Part 2: Simplified transcription of Thai language
    • Voted CONFIRM on ISO/TR 11941:1996 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Korean script into Latin characters
    • Voted ABSTAIN on ISO 15919:2001 Information and documentation —Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters

Comments and suggestions for votes from Baden Smith

  1. Provided the following comments on ISO TC171/SC1 Discussion Paper – Archiving and Electronic Storage Media:This is an odd paper, coming from ISO. The archives profession has been working on this issue for years, and it’s far from “taboo” (5) to discuss it! This paper seems to be dealing with questions that we’ve been wrestling with for a long time. It’s unclear to me whether the organization here is concerning itself with the long term viability of tape and other storage media for digital records, or whether it is concerned with storage space in a server environment. It seems to be the former (storage media), but there is also talk of electronic document storage systems.The discussion on p.5 also turns to evaluating reliability rather than life expectancy — I think that this could be a useful concept IN ADDITION to a discussion of life expectancy, but I don’t think that life expectancy is a concept without its merits. The fact is that the life expectanc of media varies greatly, but we need to work with producers of those media to consider how to make reliable media with long life expectancy. The concept of life expectancy is something that most archivists would be interested in — how long am I going to have before I have to migrate/refresh/reformat data?I like that they are trying to involve industry in this — it’s crucial to get industry behind the idea that they can/should consider long term access to the informaiton stored on their products. I guess when they are recommending an “archiving label,” they mean that the product itself would have a label that indicates that it is appropriate for long term storage.

    Comments provided by Iris Xie

  2. Voted YES on ISO/FDIS 16175-2, Information and documentation — Principles and functional requirements for records in electronic office environments — Part 2: Guidelines and functional requirements for digital records management systems
  3. Voted YES on Systematic review of ISO 3166-2.2007, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country Subdivision Codes. With the following Comments:The total number of the subdivision of China was based on the older division of Chinese provinces and a few special municipals. first of call, there are already more special municipals and secondly, the total number was too small to this huge country. In fact, it is a fair issue. Taiwan is considered as a province of China, which is fine. But Taiwan was previously already treated as an independent country so the divisions in Taiwan received exhaustive list of the codes. This is good, but it is not fair when comparing with China- where all other 29 provinces usually have one code for each.
    China:
    4 municipalities (en) / municipalité (fr) / shi (zh)
    23 provinces (en) / province (fr) / sheng (zh)
    5 autonomous regions (en) / région autonome (fr) / zizhiqu (zh)
    2 special administrative regions (en) / régionTaiwan:
    16 districts (en) / district (fr) / hsien (zh)
    5 municipalities (en) / municipalité (fr) / shih (zh)
    2 special municipalities (en) / municipalité spéciale (fr)Almost any province in mainland China is as large as or much larger than Taiwan. If the formula used for Taiwan should be used, China should receive a lot more sub-division codes. We think at least major municipalities in each province should be considered.

    Comments provided by Marcia Zeng

  4. Vote YES to approve a liaison between ISO TC46/WG8/SC9 (Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies) and The UDC Consortium, which is responsible for the maintenance of the
    Universal Decimal Classification
  5. Voted YES on New Work item: Information and Documentation – International standard document link. With the Following Comments:We agree in theory with the comments on the NO votes we have seen that the work developed by this committee could be redundant with other existing work, we agree to the formation of the committee and will withhold judgement on its activities and output until we see some concrete evidence of what it produces and in which direction it appears to be going.Commnents provided by Mark Needleman
  6. Voted NO on ISO ISO/IEC CD 27037, Information technology Security techniques – Guidelines for identification, collection, acquisition, and preservation of digitial evidence. With The Following Comments:We don’t believe this document merits being an International Standard – it really does not standardize of prescribe any behavior but seems more like a collection of recommendations and best practices – while we believe the best practices defined in the document are good in our opinion it would be better if it was publish as a Best Practices document rather than as an International Standard.Comments provided by Mark Needleman
  7. Voted YES on ISO/DTR 17068 Information and documentation -Records management – Third party repository for electronic records
  8. Voted NO on ISO/FDIS 24619, Language resource management – Persistent identification and sustainable access (PISA)
    CommentsIn item 9 of the bibliography, there are errors. The entry begins with an incomplete citation of the first edition of the MLA Handbook (Walter Achtert is not listed as an author). It then continues by listing the edition number and date of publication for the most recent MLA Style Manual, which is a different book.The heading for A.6.4 would perhaps be better construed as “MLA Style,” since the style is communicated in two books–the MLA Handbook and the MLA Style Manual. The example given is formatted using an out-of-date edition (probably the sixth edition of the MLA Handbook). The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook is the most recent publication on MLA style. We recommend it as the source for this section. You’ll find in 5.6.1 of that work that the use of a URL is no longer recommended, but the document also gives directions for inclusion if your publisher or instructor require it or if you probably cannot find the source without it. Perhaps the committee would like to review that section and then determine how it might support the case you’re trying to make.Comments provided by Margie Hlava
  9. Voted Abstain on ISO/DIS 13008, Information and documentation – Digital Records Conversion and Migration Process
  10. Vote NO on ISO/FDIS 24616, Language resources management – Multilingual information framework with the following comments:We feel that the proposed standard does not adequately
    define its purpose and application. There is a short description in the scope section and several informative appendices that explain how the standard can be used in certain applications but there is really not an adequate definition of the purpose and use of the proposed standard. It goes right into a definition of the tags defined by the standard without putting them into any real context
  11. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 14289-1, Document management applications – Electronic document file format enhancement for accessibility – Part 1: Use of ISO 32000-1 (PDF/UA-1)
  12. Voted YES on ISO/CD 25964-2, Information and documentation – Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies – Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies
  13. Voted for Barbara Preece for Vice-Chair (2011-2012)/Chair Elect (2012-2013) of the NISO Board of Directors (she was the only candidate)
  14. Cast votes for the folowing for election to the NISO Board of Directors for 2011 – 2014:Jane Burke (ProQuest)Gerry Grenier (IEEE)Chuck Koscher (CrossRef)

    Mike Teets (OCLC)

  15. Voted YES on ISO New work item proposal: Ontology Integration and Interoperability (OntoIOp)
  16. Voted YES on ISO FDIS Information and Documentation – International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organizations (ISIL) with the following comments1) some language should be added to section 4.2.3 to explain the purpose of non country code prefixes and how and when they should be used. Examples of non country code prefixes are included in Annex A Examples of ISIL but without some explanatory text in Section 4.2.3 there is no context to explain why they are there.2) ISO is developing the ISNI (international Standard Name Identifier) standard. Currently this standard is focusing on naming of individuals but the ISNI group has agreed in principle to incorporate the work of NISOs I2 (Institutional Identifiers) working group although that work has not yet started. We are concerned about the possibility of there being 2 ISO standards that essentially do the same thing and believe that ISIL committee should be thinking about how this possible conflict can be resolved so that ISO can wind up with 1 unified standard that accomplishes both what ISIL currently does and what ISNI will do if and when the work of NISOs I2 is incorporated into the ISNI standard
  17. Voted YES with Comments on ISO/NP 5127, Revision of “Information and documentation–Terminology – Comments:1) ASIST definitely believes ISO 5127 requires revision – many of the definitions in the current draft are misleading or wrong2) Also it seems like many of the terms are redundantFinally a general comment – the document seems to be a collection of any term that could apply to any area of information and documentation and as such doesnt not seem like it will be all that useful – it might be better to split the document into multiple ones that focues on the terms relevant to a specific area of information and documentation like electronic documents, physical documents, libraries,museums and archives,preservation, etc
  18. Voted No on ISO/DIS 22274, Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content – Concept-related aspects for developing and internationalizing classification systems. With the following Comments:1) We agree with the NSA comments – its unclear that the TC46 comments on the CD were addressed by this latest version2) Its also unclear exactly what this document is standardizing – it seems to be a set of recommendation – many of which are good and sensible – but hardly rise to the level of being an International Standard.
  19. Voted No Comments on Draft ISO Guide 83 – High level structure and identical text for management system standards and common core management system terms and definitions.
  20. Voted ABSTAIN due to Lack of Expertise on ISO/TR 11219, Information and documentation – Qualitative conditions and basic statistics for library buildings – Space, function and design
  21. Voted YES on New work item proposal: Revision of ISO 3901:2001, Information and documentation – International Standard Recording Code. With the Folowwing Comments:1) The proposal acknowledges that the “ecosystem” of ISRCs already assigned
    may have been “polluted” by duplicate numbers, but it is not clear to us how
    the revision will address the problem; it seems merely to ask for migration
    of already assigned ISRCs into the new system provided they are valid.2) For users of the standard, We would suggest that the definition of
    “recording” be made more explicit at the outset; it isn’t until Annex A that
    the application of ISRCs to *every track* of an album is specified – a
    hugely important distinction.3) Might it be helpful to add a field to the metadata in Annex C to indicate
    in some way online media versions (beyond the free-text version field)? A
    track on a CD and a downloaded MP3 file might be identical recorded
    performances in FRBR terms, but have different implications for stakeholders
    in the commercial field.

    4) Will there be any provision for authority control over the names of the
    “main artist” ?

    Comments provided by Timothy Dickey

  22. Sent the following comments in on ISO/IEC WD 27000, Information technology – Security techniques – Information security management systems – Overview and vocabulary:we agree with the comments submitted by NFAIS that There seem to be a lot of vocabulary
    and terminology standards with no coordination between them
  23. Replied with No Comments to ISO/IEC WD 27002, Information technology – Security techniques – Code of practice for information security management
  24. Voted AFFIRM on Systematic review ISO 2709:2008, Information and documentation – Format for information exchange
  25. Voted AFFIRM on Systematic review ISO 9707:2008, Information and documentation – Statistics on the production and distribution of books, newspapers, periodicals and electronic publications
  26. Voted YES with comments on ISO/FDIS 27730, Information and documentation – International standard collection identifier (ISCI) – We agree with the comments provided by the UK:a) Requested to insert before examples in 4.1:(a) “Because the ISCI can contain only characters that are allowed in URIs (others being encoded), the length of an ISCI can be determined by looking for the first non-URI character, typically a space or other whitespace character.”(b) noted confusion between the collection identifier (which can contain arbitrary characters and the string that represents it which has to use percent encoding.

    (c) noted uncertainty at need for (or lack of need for) percent encoding of ISIL and enclosing square brackets.

    (d) noted that case insensitivity is only defined for Latin characters.

    (e) noted that the meaning of “mandatory if applicable” was not clear.

  27. Voted YES on Proposed NISO New Work Item: Standards and Best Practices for Library Discovery Services Based on Indexed Search
  28. Voted YES on Proposed NISO New Work Item: Standards for Digital Bookmarking and Annotation Sharing
  29. Voted NO on ISO/FDIS 30300, Information and documentation ? Management systems for records – Fundamentals and vocabulary. With the following Comment:This document might make a good technical report – but it hardly rises to the level of An International Standard since it does not appear to standardize anything
  30. Voted NO on ISO/FDIS 30301, Information and documentation ? Management systems for records – Requirements. With the following Comment:This document might make a good technical report – but it hardly rises to the level of An International Standard since it does not appear to standardize anything
  31. Voted YES on ISO/CD-32000-2, Document management – Portable document format – Part 2: PDF 2.0
  32. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 1087, Terminology work – Vocabulary
  33. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 19005-3, Document management – Electronic document file format for long-term preservation – Part 3: Use of ISO 32000-1 with support for embedded files (PDF/A-3)
  34. Voted CONFIRM on the Systematic Review of 7 ISO Transiliteration Standards:
    • Systematic Review ISO 9:1995, Information and documentation — Transliteration of Cyrillic characters into Latin characters — Slavic and non-Slavic languages
    • Systematic Review ISO 233:1984, Documentation — Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters
    • Systematic Review ISO 233-2:1993, Information and documentation — Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters — Part 2: Arabic language — Simplified transliteration
    • Systematic Review ISO 259:1984, Documentation — Transliteration of Hebrew characters into Latin characters
    • Systematic Review ISO 259-2:1994, Information and documentation — Transliteration of Hebrew characters into Latin characters — Part 2: Simplified transliteration
    • Systematic Review ISO 9985:1996, Information and documentation — Transliteration of Armenian characters into Latin characters
    • Systematic Review ISO 15919:2001, Information and documentation — Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters