| TITLE: | Statement to JTC1 on use of HTML |
| SOURCE: | ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 |
| PROJECT: | |
| PROJECT EDITOR: | |
| STATUS: | WG8 approved statement |
| ACTION: | For transmission to JTC1 |
| DATE: | 24 May 1996 |
| DISTRIBUTION: | WG8 and Liaisons |
| REFER TO: | JTC 1 N 4054 (SC 18 N 5328) |
| REPLY TO: | Dr. James D.
Mason
(ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 Convenor) Oak Ridge National Laboratory Information Management Services Bldg. 2506, M.S. 6302, P.O. Box 2008 Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6302 U.S.A. Telephone: +1 423 574-6973 Facsimile: +1 423 574-6983 Network: masonjd@ornl.gov http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/wg8home.htm ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/wg8/ |
The G7 leaders have asked international standards bodies to develop a coordinated plan for the development of standards that are applicable to the setting up and use of a Global Informaiton Infrastructure (GII).
At a joint ISO/IEC/ITU seminar held in January the following recommendations were made:
Publish a Directory of GII Standards in the form of an easily accessible and comprhensive on-line index to GII standards, user needs and Work in Progress across ISO, IEC and ITU
Make the full texts of all ISO/IEC/ITU GII Standards available electronically and provide online access mechanisms to enable users to easily retrieve related sets of all global standards, which are relevant and meet their requirements.
Make current information available electronically on all GII Standards related work in progress and on proposed new work items within ISO/IEC/ITU available electronically and provide online access mechanisms to enable users to easily retrieve information on all global projects which are relevant to and me€ their requirements
Set up awareness and publicity regarding the role and contribution of ISO/IEC/ITU standards to the information society, and their increasing importance in trade, economic growth and technical policy.
Following an initial consultation period, a meeting of ISO, IEC and ITU standards development team representatives was convened in Geneva to prepare an integrated strategy for the development of internationally approved GII standards.
The ISO/IEC Special Working Group on GII (JTC1 SWG-GII) met at ISO headquarters in Geneva on June 10th and 11th to dicsuss the ISO/IEC inputs to the joint conference on development strategy. Representatives from IEC TC100, ISO TC204, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC6, SC18, SC30 and SGFS joined existing JTC1 and national standards body appointees to the SWG to put forward the views of their committees.
At present there is no agreed definition of the scope of GII. An agreed terminology for describing the features of such an infrastructure must be given a high priority if we are to ensure common understanding between standards bodies. Areas of the vocabularies developed by JTC1 SC1 to describe information technology would form a useful basis for an agreed GII terminology.
Note: ISO TC204, which deals with Intelligent Transport Systems is very active in the SWG-GII. While some of their activities, such as timetable dissemination and on-line booking, clearly falls within the remit of GII, the concept that facilities such as those used to transmit messages on road blockages to moving cars are part of GII seem somewhat strange to those of us who saw GII as the 'globalization of the Internet'. There would seem to be an urgent need to debate the true scope of what GII is about. Should it really incorporate all aspects of the home entertainment industry, including on-line management of home facilities such as burgular alarms?
JTC1 SWG-GII is to produce a preliminary analysis of the role JTC1 should play in the development of standards for GII by 15th August 1996 based on work done during the meetings held in June.
JTC1 SWG-GII is to develop a GII Standards Roadmap to help identify areas in which existing and proposed ISO/IEC standards will be applicable to GII. This roadmap should also identify areas in which standards are currently not available from standards bodies, and identify which ISO/IEC committees should be responsible for the development of such standards. The US is to produce a first draft of this roadmap for dissemination to JTC1 SC chairs by 19th August. SC chairs will be expected to comment on the roadmap, and the way they see their committees helping to complete the roadmap, prior to the September meeting of JTC1 SWG-GII.
A report on the progress of JTC1 SWG-GII will be prepared at the September meeting of the group for dissemination to JTC1 prior to their October meeting. This document will be submitted to national standards bodies for their comments by the end of November. A final report will be presented to JTC1 early in December.
The JTC1 SWG-GII work will be impacted by, and will itself impact, the work currently underway in the re-engineering of JTC1. The SWG will provide input to this work in July, and will review the work that comes out of the December Plenary.
The development of an outreach plan for promoting awareness of standards related to GII was felt to be highly important. A draft plan was drawn up by JTC1 SWG-GII as a basis for consultation with ITU-T's JRG-GII later in the week. The plan will be reviewed by national bodies prior to the JTC1 plenary.
The ITU Telecommunications Joint Rapporteur Group on GII (ITU-T JRG-GII) met on May 11th to prepare their input to the joint meeting. An extensive report (R.60) from Study Gropu 13 identified the currently available ITU-T work on GII, and outlined the plans of the ETSI EPII Starter Group in this area. The 92pp report included some sample scenarios of the role of GII. All these scenarios, however, stopped at the point communication had been established between user locations, and took little or no account of the need for application specific communication. Comments from a number of ITU member bodies were reviewed at the meeting. Some changes to the study group report were agreed prior to the joint meeting, but discussion on some of the key papers was not possible in the time available.
The ITU-T JRG-GII meeting prepared a draft Work Programme for the GII as part of their input to the joint meeting. This plan was split into four major areas, for which separate project areas were identified as follows:
The list was well documented in areas F.1 to F.3, N.1 to N.8 and M.1 and M.2, but ITU-T could not complete planning of M.3 to M.8, or the fourth group of work areas, without ISO/IEC input.
Following an initial plenary session of the 60+ attendees, which overviewed the work carried out to date by the two groups and defined the aims of the joint meeting, members split into two groups, one of which looked at the existing scenarios to determine how they should be extended and improved while the other group discussed the draft work programme.
The 23-strong group discussing the draft work programme spend a lot of time discussing why it was impossible for ISO/IEC to provide input in the form requested. The parts of the work programme which have been drafted in detail are all based on work projects being proposed within ETSI. Most ETSI projects are defined in terms that fit the terms of reference of ITU-T study groups or ETSI technical committees. The programme takes no account of the way in which ISO has subsetted its applications-based work. For example, many ISO SCs develop APIs that are used across networks: it is unclear how such SCs should interact with proposed project M.2.
JTC1 SWG-GII had determined that the only response it could make to the request for identifying relationships between of JTC1 SCs and ITU-T study groups at present was to identify JTC1 as a whole as related to each of the major areas of work proposed, and to identify other ISO and IEC TCs that would need to liai€ with specific areas of the proposed work programme.
A contribution from Bellcore to ITU-T proposing the adoption of a needs-based approach to documenting user requirements was discussed. This approach, which already forms the basis of the US IISP programme, had already been accepted by the JTC1 SWG-GII as a useful concept. When ITU-T delegates compared it with the ETSI approach to project specification that they were proposing it was decided that a preliminary stage for the formal specification of user needs for each project would have clear advantages. It was felt that ISO/IEC and ITU-T should adopt a common, forms-based, approach to capturing user needs, defining work programmes to meet specific needs and to report on progress to date against milestones set in the work programmes. An existing IISP needs capture form will be used as the basis for the user-need capture, the ETSI work programme specification structure will be used for defining work programmes and ISO will propose a standardized method for reporting on progress.
The group looking at the draft scenarios identified a number of areas where they could be usefully extended, but were unable to complete application-based scenarios without more detailed consideration of their concepts by experts of various JTC1 SCs. It was accepted, however, that the new scenarios must take into account community and other societal needs as well as those of business users proposed by ITU-T. It was also accepted that business needs went beyond the needs of service providers, which have been the focus of most of the scenarios drafted to date.
The second day of the joint conference started with 42 members discussing the draft JTC1 SWG-GII Outreach Plan. It appears that SME has a special meaning within ITU-T, so references to specific targetting to small and medium enterprises as part of the draft outline plan had to avoid use of this term. In addition it was felt that the word plan presented too fixed an objective. Instead it was proposed that the document should outline a stragegy for how the two standardization groups should aim to extend their existing services to customers over time.
The rest of the meeting was taken up with drafting a set of documents detailing future action plans, and preparing a draft press release. These documents will be circulated to ISO/IEC and ITU-T committees involved in GII to obtain their input for the September meetings organized by the two committees for consecutive weeks. The ITU-T JRG-GII meeting will be held in Ottawa from 17th to 20th September, while the ISO/IEC SWG-GII meeting will be held in Galway from 25th to 27th September.
Both groups were to reconvene separately on the morning of June 14th to prepare their individual plans in response to the joint meeting. (Unfortunately I was unable to stay for these wrap-up meetings.)
Martin Bryan