Location: Group 1: Annotation Standards

Discussion: Another dimension of quality of standardsReported This is a featured thread

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EmilyMBender
EmilyMBender
Another dimension of quality of standards
Jul 19 2009, 5:19 PM EDT | Post edited: Jul 19 2009, 5:19 PM EDT
From the perspective of WG7, another dimension to consider when evaluating the quality of a standard is how it fits in to the overall ecology of standards. Is it connected to other relevant standards? Is it approved by/submitted to ISO?
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mebeckman
mebeckman
1. RE: Another dimension of quality of standards
Jul 20 2009, 10:25 AM EDT | Post edited: Jul 20 2009, 10:25 AM EDT
Thanks Emily, for giving us a word to cover the matrix of issues that we have been wrestling with here, where we see tensions among different aspects of the four dimensions that we already identified as desiderata. One is the tension between aspects of "useability" and of "extensibility/adaptability" -- especially between the desirability of developing a standard early enough in the emergence of some cooperative endeavor in order to be able to (build tools that) enable efficient corpus building, and the danger of codifying so early that the annotation conventions (or the tool) enforce an analysis that delays scientific advance when the phenomena are not amenable to being conceptualized within existing ontologies. (This was the tension that Mark also noted in his comments after our report yesterday.) A second is the conflict between aspects of interoperability and extensibility/adaptability -- e.g., between what we had been calling "top-down" (or "ISO-type") and "bottom-up" (or "organic") approaches to the development of annotation standards, which we know see is another species of what Working Group 6 called "the balance between central planning and bottom-up initiative" (linking in the Wikipedia page on the metaphor of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar). If your group has thoughts about how to couch a discussion of these tensions and how to link to relevant passages of the "white paper" that y'all are writing, we would very much like to hear them! Do you find this valuable?