Future of Interoperability Standards September 2010

History: version of this page at the start of the meeting (the page has now been edited to be a post-meeting record.

Background
The meeting took place on September 24th 2010 at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, London.

Position papers, reflections and notes from the previous meeting (January 2010 in Bolton)

This meeting is in association with the ICOPER Best Practice Network.

About the Meeting
This event, the second in a workshop/discussion series on the "future of interoperability standards" is of interest to those directly involved with the development of formal or informal interoperability specifications and standards, especially in education but also in the research and cultural heritage domains. Whereas previously the emphasis was on policy and process and the relationship between formal and informal standards-development models, this time we will focus on the technical approaches to creating standards: how should we model and document standards. This could include questions of structure/segmentation, arguments about application of semantic web approaches, application models in relation to core models, how to handle statements about conformance.

A future event will consider the vital precursor to "technical approaches": methods to surface and agree on the conceptual models.

Aims of the meeting:
 * To share understanding on the issues arising from current technical approaches in LET standardisation and spec development
 * To identify cases and practice that appear to avoid or mitigate these issues
 * To forumulate actions we can take, singly or collectively, to advance practice in our domain

Intended outcomes:
 * Written contributions and reflections from participants.
 * A summary of shared understanding and agreement within the meeting
 * Recommendations and suggestions for action

Tagging:
 * Twitter #cetisfis hashtag.
 * Blogging and del.icio.us tag cetis-fis.

"Position Papers"
Please interpret "position paper" very loosely, these are essentially an opportunity for pre-meeting expression of ideas and reading.


 * Adam Cooper (PDF, 580kB)
 * Scott Wilson (HTML)
 * [[media:FIS_2010_09_24_-_Kleeman.pdf | John Kleeman]] (PDF)
 * Tore Hoel (HTML)
 * Brunella Longo (PDF)
 * [[media:ADL_One_Size_Doesnt_Fit_All.pdf | Dan Rehak #1]] (PDF)
 * [[media:ADL_Initial_Experiences_With_Structured_Markup.pdf | Dan Rehak #2]] (PDF)
 * Kirstie Coolin (PDF) Kirstie comments that this is a project report relating experiences implemeting XCRI and refers us to the sections covering recommendations and user consultations.
 * Simon Grant (HTML).
 * Erlend Overby (HTML)
 * [[media:OntologyBasedStandards_-_Haravi.pdf | Bahareh Haravi]]
 * Steve Lay (HTML)

Notes from the Meeting
The meeting largely comprised of a number of group discussions on selected topics followed by reporting back and plenary discussion. There was also a lot of ad hoc discussion that didn't get recorded

Notes from each theme:
 * conformance requirements.
 * implementability.
 * structure and semantics.
 * building in extensibility and reuse.
 * gathering requirements

We also identified the following topics as being of potential interest but they were not the focus of group discussion:
 * commercial pragmatics.
 * structured markup. (e.g. DITA)

Post-meeting Blog Posts etc
if yours isn't here, drop me a line or edit the wiki yourself (registration required), [mailto:a.r.cooper@bolton.ac.uk]


 * Sheila MacNeill