Technical Specifications and International Standards

[igrangel]

What makes then similar and what different, in terms of OWL properties and axioms, from Standards and Technical Specifications?

[TasneemRashid]

Technical specification is different from a standard in the fact that it has not been passed through all the approval stages to be called a standard.

[igrangel]

Yes, agree, but how can this fact be represented in the ontology in terms of properties and axioms? For example, are the classes disjoint (owl:disjointWith), which properties they share and which they do not?

[PriyankaNanjappa]

sto:TechnicalSpecification owl:disjointWith sto:Standard;

[igrangel]

Can you provide a reason for supporting this design decision?

[PriyankaNanjappa]

Technical Specifications have the same attributes as a Standard does. In the IEC Webstore, one needs to look carefully what the publication type is otherwise you could easily not notice that it is a Technical Specification. In real world, this means that the Technical Specifications are yet to go through various approval stages to be called a Standard. The decision to introduce sto:TechnicalSpecification owl:disjointWith sto:Standard; relationship was to clarify the difference against the visual similarity in the way they are both represented in Webstore.

[sebbader]

I agree that they are sufficiantly different, nevertheless sto:TechnicalSpecification owl:disjointWith sto:Standard; is dangerous. Let's say: A a sto:TechnicalSpecification . A sto:hasClassification x .

leads to:

owl:Thing equals owl:Nothing . because:

sto:hasClassification rdfs:domain sto:Standard .

I am not saying that we do not need the separation. But the properties are not (yet) modeled accordingly.

[sebbader]

A connected topic is the treatments of IETF RFCs (request for comment). While being a proposal in the original sense, RFCs are defacto standards. How do we want to model them? example sto:RFC_1122 rdf:type sto:Standard ; or sto:RFC_1122 rdf:type sto:TechnicalSpecification;

[PriyankaNanjappa]

About the sto:hasClassification rdfs:domain sto:Standard We initially worked like this. The Properties we created had sto:Standard as its domain. But once we created the class sto:Publication, this was an intermediate logical level between foaf:Document and sto:Standard. sto:TechnicalSpecification and sto:Standard are both a sto:Publication type.

and the Domains of properties changed to sto:Publication, as in the example sto:PublicationDate or sto:hasPublisher.

Please check if the Domain of sto:hasClassification can be changed to sto:Publication and it should solve the issue.

[PriyankaNanjappa]

About the RFCs. We could model as follows

sto:RFC_1122 rdf:type sto:Publication or sto:RFC_1122 rdf:type foaf:Document

Since they are neither Standards nor Technical Specification. They are a different Kind of Document. But still specifies information similar to standards. I would prefer for it to be sto:Publication but, sto:Publication as defined by IEC-Publication which is our reference ,talks only about International Standards,Technical Specifications,Publicly Available Specifications,Amendments,Technical Corrigenda, Interpretation Sheets,Technical Reports,Guides but not RFCs. I guess we could modify our sto:Publication to include RFCs and model them as Publications

[PriyankaNanjappa]

Please have a look at this push. We distinguish Standards from specifications like this.

[sebbader]

In my view, RFCs fit into the definition of sto:Publication . You are right, IEC does not directly use the term 'RFC' but the further explanation perfectly fit. Therefore, let's put it one hierarchy level up and we are fine.

[sebbader]

If we do so, we definitly need to adjust the domain statements as you suggested in your comment

[PriyankaNanjappa]

And this will be our Technical Report. Another kind of Publication/Document

[PriyankaNanjappa]

If we agree on this, we will make sure to update the definition of what a Publication means to us and make all the new kinds of Standard documents that we encounter further as a Publication type.