search

opengeospatial / ogc-modspec

OGC ModSpec in Metanorma
0 stars 0 forks source link

The ModSpec is an OGC Policy document #9

Open cnreediii opened 5 days ago

cnreediii commented 5 days ago

There are ambiguities and inconsistent usage of the terms "policy" and "standard". Historically, the ModSpec was developed in the OGC Policy SWG. The document was originally called a Policy Standard. However, for some reason, the SWG decided to call the ModSpec a "standard".

To eliminate the ambiguities and resulting confusion, the following are recommendations to be discussed and decided on:

Recommendation 1: This revision of the ModSpec shall be termed an OGC Policy. Recommendation 2: As appropriate, all references in the ModSpec to "standard" shall be replaced with "policy". Obviously, this is based on context!

See also issue 5.

ronaldtse commented 2 days ago

Thank you @cnreediii for raising this topic!

The ModSpec traditionally is used for two purposes in OGC:

  1. As a policy stating that OGC standards need to be "modular" which means that requirement classes are the normative parts of its standards
  2. As a specification of the information models for requirement classes, conformance classes, and the normative statements like requirements, recommendations and permissions (implied but not defined in the document).

There are other organizations that use the ModSpec as in use case 2, most prominently, ISO/TC 211, which adopts ModSpec "unofficially, but de facto". You can see these in the OGC-submitted documents like ISO 19170, or ones done by authors related to OGC like ISO 19115-3 and ISO 19135. These organizations only want to adopt the data structures defined in the ModSpec, not the policy part.

For other organizations that adopt ModSpec, they need the ModSpec object definitions to be in a "standard" instead of a "policy", since they would probably not be willing to "adopt an OGC Policy".

It seems that there are at least two ways to achieve this cleanly:

  1. Split ModSpec into two documents:
    • 1 OGC Policy that says "develop modular standards using the ModSpec models"
    • 1 OGC Standard that says "these are the specifications of the ModSpec models"
  2. Say that an "OGC Policy is a type of OGC Standard"...? Still needs explanation for those organizations to justify why...
heidivanparys commented 2 days ago

@ronaldtse @jetgeo

I thought that ISO/TC 211 has ISO 19105 as a standard to conform to with regard to the “information model for requirements classes, etc.”?

ronaldtse commented 2 days ago

@heidivanparys is correct! The latest ISO 19105 does provide a basis for ISO/TC 211 standards’ requirements.

However, its models are a minimal subset of ModSpec, so some standards in TC 211 adopt ModSpec fully (as a “superset” of 19105).

On the other hand, the proposed models from ISO/TC 211/AHG 5 (after 19105) were more or less identical to ModSpec, so ModSpec does have a great influence.