On 27/10/2010 21:10, Grahame Grieve wrote: >> In all other industries, the quality of standards is >> measured initially against public safety and then >> against criteria of effectiveness and economic qualities. > it seems you mean, by market testing. If not, do you have an example?
well yes and no. Products produced by big companies of course have to undergo all kinds of testing to do with safety. With respect to fitness for purpose, the market will certainly sort a lot out. But to get to market, you have to have completely implemented and productised the offering - which means going way past the paper stage. By the time standards agencies see these things, they are guaranteed to 'work', the only question is to do with what they interoperate with. >> In all other industries that i know of, standards are >> created by a process whose inputs are already developed >> and productised offerings from companies > I presume you refer to non-it industries. In IT the picture is rather > more mixed. You certainly aren't describing the omg process, or the > itu process, or the w3c process here. IT in recent decades has become quite poor, no doubt about it. Older standards (e.g. older network standards) tended to have hardware implications, and they simply could not be issued without having being implemented somewhere. In more recent times, W3C does at least manage some implementations of what it issues, but is mainly helped by major tech companies implementing the standards. Nevertheless, standards like XML Schema are still horrible, very weak formal underpinning, and hardly fit for purpose (being a document-based idea trying to satisfy data representation requirements). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Schema_Language_Comparison . OMG has better process than any SDO in e-health, but the output is not always that inspiring. UML 2 is awful (try reading the 'infrastructure' and 'superstructure' specs - you really have to wonder what drugs they were taking), as is XMI. Which is why the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) sprung up in the modelling space - to provide a usable alternative to XMI. > A truly valid comparison would be with IT standards in other vertical > markets. Insurance always strikes me as applicable. Do you have any > examples from these spaces? * * I know a bit about investment, and there is to be sure, less to standardise. The interesting comparisons I think are in construction, mobile telephony, automotive, telecomms, etc. Standards just don't get issued as paper with no products behind them in these industries. - thomas -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101027/f1d217de/attachment.html>
