What's normative [was Re: Monday 05 Jan QAWG telecon agenda]

A question for QAWG consideration (related to our old SpecGL issue of 
"What's normative")...

At 11:01 AM 12/23/2003 -0500, Dom wrote:
>[...]
>3.) Presentation by Sandro Hawke of the work done by the OWL
>WG and the RDF WG for the development of their test materials
>and the gathering of the tests results. A few references:
>- OWL Test repository: http://www.w3.org/2002/03owlt/
>- OWL Test Cases document: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-test/

This is a minor point and is really peripheral to the main topics for the 
Jan 5th telecon, but I don't understand something here.  This Abstract of 
the OWL test document declares that it is normative.  The document has a 
lot of content labelled "Normative", and indeed all of the OWL test cases 
are called normative.

Now I can understand how something like the "test case types" section could 
be called normative.  It could considered to place testable conformance 
requirements on a class of product called "Test Suite".  I.e., OWL could 
define the concept of a valid OWL test suite, and "test case types" 
expresses some rules that candidate test suites must pass.

But how are the collected approved OWL test cases themselves 
normative?  For what class of product do they express some testable 
requirement?  Each of test case tests a (normative) testable requirement of 
OWL, but that is different from expressing some testable requirement.  Each 
of them is approved and officially sanctioned by the OWL WG, but that does 
not mean the same as "normative" (at least as I understand and use the term).

Any ideas?

>- OWL Test Results: http://www.w3.org/2003/08/owl-systems/test-results-out
>- RDF Test Cases: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/

Aside... Sec 1.2 contains an interesting assertion about errata and their 
normativity.

Another aside...  A format for a Manifest File is defined, which appears to 
be an instance of a TCDL.

-Lofton.

Received on Saturday, 3 January 2004 13:01:40 UTC