Re: Web Payments IG (Steering Group) Charter - Final Call for Comments

David's tongue-in-cheek comment carries an element of insight that
ought to be addressed. Terminology does matter in communication,
contracting and litigation, and my thoughts are:

1. Neither the financial world nor the technology world need yet
another glossary to be maintained. My original suggestion on this
point was for W3C to simply adopt an existing glossary. I'd add that
if there's refinement or extensions to do, then the (soon) W3C
Interest Group can simply request that the appropriate standard's
technical committee address the change within its process. W3C has a
mandate for a certain domain of standards, but this does not extend to
all the terminology touched by its use cases.

2. In the references given, UNCITRAL and the ISO are, in their
domains, the premier standards bodies, and they both have legal
significance. However The World Bank is not a standards body, it is an
operational stakeholder. If the World Bank wants certain tweaks to
terminology in the language for the web payments domain, it should
express these issues to UNCITRAL WG IV as the global standards body
for reference or "model" law on electronic commerce, and/or the
ISO/TC68 which is the global standards body for financial services
messaging. I'm not denigrating the World Bank in any way, indeed I've
contracted to the Bank at various times. I'm only saying that the W3C
is not the place for the WB or any organization to introduce
terminology that differs from UNCITRAL and the ISO terms.

-- 
Joseph Potvin
Operations Manager | Gestionnaire des opérations
The Opman Company | La compagnie Opman
jpotvin@opman.ca
Mobile: 819-593-5983

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 12:58 PM, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The charter includes this within its initial scope statement:
>
> Web Payments terminology:
>
> Identify and review existing terminology that has been established by a
> variety of international organizations and standards. This includes e.g.
> UNCITRAL terminology, World Bank Terminology, ISO20022 or ISO29115.
> Adopt, refine or extend existing terminology(ies) to cover needs identified
> in new use-cases or scenarios
>
> Somewhere within the charter document, explicitly declare production and
> maintenance of a deliverable, authoritatively versioned, normative glossary
> of recommended and deprecated terminology as a goal and purpose of the
> working group. This goal may be considered implied within "Adopt, refine or
> extend" but those seem to this reviewer to be insufficiently explicit
> internal-facing verbs.
>
> This Official Glossary would be a third deliverable, with a success criteria
> of references made to it in other documentation.
>
> Claiming maintenance of The Official Glossary would give the WG a permanent
> focus and reason to exist, and afford opportunities to reward volunteers
> with intrinsically amusing debate on word choice as well as glory of
> authoritative recognition.
>
>
> Thank you
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2014 17:32:01 UTC