I thought I remembered reading recently that ISO will consider a database
an official version of a standard. If anyone has any further information
about this policy, please let me know.

Rebecca

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Christian Galinski wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
> 
> I agree with the pragmatic approach, Peter suggests. Many "informative
> notes" in fact are already contained in Håvard's database.
> 
> Ultimately the language codes will become a universally accessible
> repository - hopefully comprising some dynamic features (i.e. user
> interaction). There may be types of notes with different degree of
> "authoritativeness" - as Peter indicates. And the "history" of every
> item in the repository should be transparent to everybody (including
> comments from the user, which have NOT been taken into consideration). 
> 
> Development goes away from "published" versions of the standards in the
> direction of "constantly living" standards in the form of such
> repositories. The content of these repositories is constantly updated
> following real needs and in the course of /content/ maintenance it will
> be "enriched" with pertinent knowledge. That is why I suggested to
> discuss with ISO, how such repositories could be accomodated in the
> ISOTC server (and in ISO/CS there are people who have started thinking
> about this - not only for terminology, codes like our 639, etc., but for
> virtually all standards, which in most cases are highly structured
> content=information).
> 
> I think we have already started early to think in this direction, and
> technology develops in such a way to make these conceptions - and maybe
> even more daring ones - feasible.
> 
> Best regards
> Christian
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
> Of Peter Constable
> Sent: Mittwoch, 12. Januar 2005 01:21
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: RE: Réf. : Re: RE: Réf. : Re: Occitan and ISO 639-3 : French
> linguistics position
> 
> 
> > From: ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
> > Behalf Of Anila Angjeli
> 
> > I agree
> > with Rebecca ont the fact that none of us would have the time to go 
> > through the whole standard and determine where notes are need. But I 
> > don't think that this should be discouraging and if it is to be done 
> > there should be once a starting point.
> 
> Just to clarify what I had in mind in my original message, I was not
> assuming that informative notes would have to be prepared for all
> entries that might need them before any could be published. That would,
> of course, be a possible way to proceed. I agree with Anila, though,
> that it would be acceptable and beneficial to users if we added
> individual annotations to our tables as needs for clarification are
> identified. 
> 
> I would consider these to be informative, not normative, annotations,
> and so I don't think there would be a need to align a particular set of
> them with a particular published version of the standard(s). E.g. in the
> draft for 639-3, I put in wording that would give leeway to the RA to
> provide additional information of this sort in clause 4.3:
> 
> "To facilitate unambiguous documentation of the intended denotation of
> each identifier, the Registration Authority... may provide additional
> informative information regarding any given language..."
> 
> 
> Peter Constable
>