Dear Martin, The ISO does NOT keep any such things for any standards. It just develops standards, guidelines, which can be adopted as mandatory,e.g. for safety, production specs or voluntary like ISO 9000 for quality assurance and control.
The standards I am referring to would be Outlines of Guidelines or the Basic Principles and Elements to be included, or the actual Guidelines themselves which would detail as John Flynn put it some "benchmarking" for vetting procedures. The idea of a standard is to capture all the possible "best practice" elements in one coherent document. In the case of ontologies it would build on input from IEEE and similar professional bodies from which the ISO JTC1/SC32 and its WG2 typically draws its committee members. There are quite a few industry sectors and governments in particular which choose to use standards whenever available, if not just for quality control and assurance then for accountability reasons. Anyone using ISO 9000 or an industry specific standard for quality is encouraged to use standards. So the standard would just contain the best possible guidelines to capture all best practice elements, gleaned from input of industry bodies or professional bodies, building on the relevant and applicable specs for ontologies. Who actually builds, maintains and publishes the ontologies is of no concern to the ISO. Just referring to the Linked Open Data star badges, mentioned by Michael Hausenblas on another email to one of the w3c lists, these could be backed up by a standard which simply lists the vetting procedures and adherence to which specs and elements compliance is met in order to use the corresponding number of stars. And to make a point some times a "standard" created or endorsed by industry associations, professional bodies or other institutions can be proposed as a standard and with some minor additions published as such by the ISO. Milton Ponson GSM: +297 747 8280 PO Box 1154, Oranjestad Aruba, Dutch Caribbean Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide by creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide and: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. --- On Wed, 12/8/10, Martin Hepp <[email protected]> wrote: From: Martin Hepp <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Any reason for ontology reuse? To: "Semantic Web" <[email protected]> Cc: "Martijn van der Plaat" <[email protected]>, "Percy Enrique Rivera Salas" <[email protected]>, [email protected], "Toby Inkster" <[email protected]>, "ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2010, 9:35 AM In general, I think that the Semantic Web must use a decentralized approach for the definition and adoption of conceptual elements, same as the Web uses decentralized, fault-tolerant approaches as a fundamental principle. So calling for standardization bodies to maintain "authoritative" vocabularies will not work at Web Scale, IMO. At least, standards bodies may be to slow to provide ontologies and ontology updates (INCOTERMS, for instance, updates it's definition of trade terms only once per decade) A few related papers: 1. Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the Development of Relevant Ontologies, in: IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 90-96, Jan-Feb 2007 PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/IEEE-IC-PossibleOntologies-published.pdf 2. E-Business Vocabularies as a Moving Target: Quantifying the Conceptual Dynamics in Domains, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2008), September 29 - October 3, 2008 (forthcoming), Acitrezza, Italy, Springer LNCS, Vol. 5268, pp. 388-403. PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/ConceptualDynamics-EKAW2008-CRC-final6.pdf Best Martin
