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
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