On 13 May 2009, at 10:48, Oliver Ruebenacker wrote:
Hello Bijan, Michael, All,The group does not deliver standards, but can submit something for consideration to W3C.
Hence my care in distinguishing what the group can and cannot do.
I remember this being discussed indetail in one of the phone conferences.
Well, if you would read a little more carefully, you wouldn't have to remember.
If SBML is not deserving of being a standard, the what is?
HTML.
Something no one uses?
Ah yes, non sequiturial rhetorical questions that were obviously intended as a crushing dialectical blow, and succeed at being such --- just not in the intended direction.
There are a host of reasons to undertake standardization in a formal standards body and a host of reasons not to. The best one, in my opinion, is ensuring interoperability of existing systems (i.e., to reduce competition at one level to enable better competition at another level). In my opinion, standardization shouldn't be regarded as something akin to publishing a journal article (i.e., a sanctioned archival representation of a body of significant work). (BTW, this is just to give an example of what I would consider a bad reason, not to remotely suggest that this is "the reason" for pursuing SBML standardization. I don't *know* what the reasons are for pursuing SBML standardization, hence my asking for, you know, a reasonable discussion of the rationale. That discussion has to happen as there lots of people you have to convince aside from me.)
Standardization has costs that can harm efforts. It drains time, energy, money, control. For example, the standard expected commitment of an organization to a W3C WG is on engineer day a week (more, if you're an editor). A WG is a committee that you do not control the membership of. Indeed, that is the W3C...you have to convince a lot of people who *properly do not care about SBML* (or OWL, or...) that it's worth diverting the *extremely limited* resources the W3C has to SBML.
There's a lot of politics since there are limited resources. Your sort of know-nothing arrogance will, I suspect, play rather poorly. It is so playing with me and I started this conversation fairly sympathetic to SBML.
I've been involved in lots of W3C WGs both inside and outside the semantic web area and am trying to offer considered, reasoned, helpful advice based on my experience and understanding of the process. If you don't want that input, then yay. I'll stop now.
Cheers, Bijan.
