Re: IETF RFCs

----- creed@opengeospatial.org wrote:
> Very true. The IETF WG's I am involved in are not prone to
> philosophical discussions. The groups tend to be very pragmatic and technical. They
> also leverage other standards whenever and wherever they can.

Well, while 'ontology' does come originally from philosophy, that wasn't
quite where I was going... though I will admit that I've always thought that
many standards which *don't* come out of the IETF milieu tend to seem sort
of ivory-tower, or blue-sky (choose whichever vaguely disparaging adjective 
you prefer :-) in their framing and view of the space in question.

But you make an *excellent* point in your fourth sentence, and your other 
posting: whenever possible, make use of already extant standards for anything
you can -- such as the references to ISO 8601 for timestamp standardization
which drew me into posting on this list in the first place.

Restrict, extend, do whatever you can, but try your best to Get The Glue Right
(my favorite design maxim).

And note that leveraging Other People's Standards doesn't usually carry the
same potential downfalls as leveraging Other People's Code -- but, on the
other hand, doing so allows potential implementors to leverage that OPC
to do such things as parsing and validating said data elements, which can
reduce time-to-'market'.

I say "'market'" because of my other observation: open-source standards seem
to me to avoid the same pitfall open-source code does: lots of non-IETF
standards bodies seem to be populated by people who are there because they
do that for a living... in consequence of which they have a commercial axe to 
grind.

My, but I'm cranky this afternoon, aren't I?  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra@baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
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             Those who cast the vote decide nothing.
             Those who count the vote decide everything.
               -- (Josef Stalin)

Received on Sunday, 7 December 2008 20:17:19 UTC