Professor Lee,

In reply to this email and another, rather than putting comments through
BSI currently, I'd prefer to give a view of the document as a whole,
which you have made a good start at bringing into ISO.

The closest standard I am aware of in relation to it is ISO 11404,
Information technology - Programming languages, their environments and
system software interfaces - Language-independent datatypes. The
relationship is more to do with the way in which certain items have
been described. e.g (although it does not reproduce so well here):

6.3.1 Equality
In every value space there is a notion of equality, for which the following rules hold:
• for any two instances (a, b) of values from the value space, either a is equal to b, denoted a =b, or a is
not equal to b, denoted ;
• there is no pair of instances (a, b) of values from the value space such that both a =b and ;
• for every value a from the value space, a =a;
• for any two instances (a, b) of values from the value space, a =b if and only if b =a;
• for any three instances (a, b, c) of values from the value space, if a =b and b =c, then a =c.
On every datatype, the operation Equal is defined in terms of the equality property of the value space, by:
• for any values a, b drawn from the value space, Equal(a,b) is true if a =b, and false otherwise.


From an implementation persepective, it makes sense to declare the various
elements of feature structures and their operations (which I'd suggest
forms a key part of the core rather than bringing up the rear in an annex).
I also think it would work well to keep the notation away from the
SGML/XML-based representation of the notation (which gives a cluttered
feel at present). In keeping clean of the XML representation, which
realistically is targeted at machine processing, although for some reason
humans seem to like the effort of parsing it also, the feature
structure standard would be able to provide a similar style/vocabulary
approach already published in ISO 16642 (As of today, officially known
in the UK as BS ISO 16642 - Hi Laurent). I'd go as far as to suggest
putting the XML representation as an informative annex, where items
refer to the relevant defining section, and perhaps operations and results
can be shown accordingly.

Those are my views - I hope they are of use.

Best Regards.



Dear Contributors,
 
Most of you, if not all, must have received from your national organization on standardization a copy of the working draft for FSR, feature structure representation, for critical (and editorial) comments by now. If not, please write me, klee@korea.ac.kr or Lou Burnard of Oxford. 
 
If you are so-called ISO experts officially recommended by your organization to ISO/TC 37/SC 4 Secretariat, then you must have been asked to submit your comments to your organization by mid-October as part of the so-called CD ballot on the status of the working draft. These comments will then be passed on to me, so-called project leader and editor, through the mentioned Secretariat, for compiling them for further work on the document. 
 
Nevertheless, I would like to encourage you, as several of us have done this already, to circulate your comments among us, a small group of the TEI and ISO joint contributors,  by using the group e-mail address, tei-iso-fs@maillist.ox.ac.uk. I hope to see your detailed but constructive comments floating around among us by early October so that we have some concrete ideas for improving the document when we meet in Nancy, France, for the first TEI-ISO joint meeting on 4 and 5 September, 2003, just prior to the TEI Consortium annual meeting at the same city.
 
As for this meeting, Laurent Romary, ISO/TC 37/SC 4 chair and convener for this working group, will soon send you Call for Participation with detailed information. But please note down in your calendar with big red letters that we'll be gathering in Nancy on those two days for enjoyable encounter. You will also be asked by Laurent or Key-Sun Choi, SC 4 Secretary, to come to Jeju Island, South Korea, for another grand meeting or the finale, working on the final(?) draft, while facing the Pacific Ocean with the snow-capped 1950 meter high Halla mountain in the back on 4-6 February, 2004. (Please don't blame or praise me for all these meetings. I used to enjoy going to meetings abroad, but have become very SLOW since I've been to a back-breaking week-long meeting in OSlow, NO-way.)
 
Best wishes,
Kiyong  
P {margin-top:2px;margin-bottom:2px;} 
Kiyong Lee 
klee@korea.ac.kr 
Professor Emeritus Korea University, Seoul
+82-2-535-6256 (home, Seoul) 
Mobile: 011-234-6256 in Korea only


\o/
\o/ Lee Gillam: L.Gillam@surrey.ac.uk 
\o/ http://www.computing.surrey.ac.uk/personal/st/L.Gillam
\o/ Tel: +44 1483 879633
\o/ Fax: +44 1483 876051
\o/

Philosophy Dept. You don't have to be to work here, but it helps