Meeting Report

X3L8 Special Interest Group

Held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology

December 17 & 18, 1997

Attendees:

Bruce Bargmeyer, Environmental Protection Agency

Eliot Christian, US Geological Survey

Larry Fitzwater, Environmental Protection Agency

William Kenworthey, Jr., Self

Bill LaPlant, Jr., Bureau of the Census

Doug Mann, Pacific Northwest Laboratory

Judith Newton, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Phong Ngo, Science Applications International Corporation

Marilyn Slater, Department of Defense

Judith Newton chaired the meetings.

The following reports the issues raised and decisions made:

1. Metamodel for the Management of Sharable Data, DpANS X3.285

Phong Ngo and Doug Mann have completed the work necessary to get this out for public review. The review period is from Dec 5, 1997 to Feb 3, 1998.

2. Discussion of SC32

The SC32 Secretariat has called for comments on the name, scope and organization for SC32. Doug Mann prepared a draft response. We reviewed the document prepared by Doug and made comments. He is adding material as suggested.

Eliot Christian discussed the possible development of standards that could support global information locator services. He expressed a desire to engage this at a level higher than the protocol level addressed in efforts to date. There is a need to standardize a common interface that could be used by searchers to present their search patterns (any multimedia search pattern) and have information providers respond appropriately. Some standard interfaces (Z39.50, MARC, LDAP/X.500, EDI, etc) already handle registered semantics. How the semantics could be registered in common, made interoperable, and extended through automated processes needs to be established

This would include raising the current protocol-level standard to an interface-level standard for the semantic interoperability of networked information discovery and retrieval. For example, an object interface could be specified in Interface Definition Language rather than the ANSI Z39.50 search protocol. In addition, a more general solution to semantic interoperability could make use of the work on new metadata registries while preserving interoperability with traditional bibliographic semantics. For more information see: URL: www.g7.fed.us/gils and the related information about Environment and Natural Resource Management (ENRM).

This work is closely related to data semantics, a major area of work proposed for SC32. We decided to include some material about this potential work in L8's response to the SC32 Secretariat. Elliot Christian will prepare a page of descriptive material. It will be sent to Doug Mann for inclusion in the response to the SC32 Secretariat. Doug Mann will complete the revisions and Phong Ngo will send out an email ballot, so that we can quickly get the response back to the SC32 secretariat.

We discussed the potential inclusion of other interests in the work plan of SC32. Of particular interest is the work of the former SC18/WG8. Their work in SGML/HTML/XML is particularly relevant to the area of data semantics. Bill LaPlant will check with the convener Dr. James Mason of JTC1/WG4 (formerly SC18/WG8) to see if they are interested in joining SC32. If so we will see if we can get an invitation issued to them to participate in the February 1998 meeting SC32.

We discussed the possibility of a number of government agencies going together to support the Secretariat for SC32. There appears to be interest in this and we will pursue it.

The interim SC32 chair is Joel Urman.

3. Discussion of April Metadata Registration workshop

We will hold a workshop to discuss implementations of ISO/IEC 11179 and ANSI DpANS X3.285. A tentative set of topics and an agenda was set out in the last L8 SIG meeting. We revisited the purpose and decided the primary focus should be on information exchange and establishing areas of collaboration. Workshop themes would include.

Information exchange, introduce concepts to new (or potential) implementers

Establish a collaboration between registry efforts.

Extend and harmonize of standards and content

Extend the utilization of 11179 to new universes of discourse.

Get a few data registries underway with efforts to exchange metadata between them.

Identify areas where one organization can take a lead in developing particular capabilities that can be shared with others

Bill LaPlant and/or Dan Gillman will look into getting rooms at the BLS conference center for this meeting. Judith Newton has reserved rooms at NIST as a fallback.

4. BSR meeting

We discussed a proposed meeting with BSR folks. The proposed meeting date is the week of March 2, 1998 in the Washington D.C. area. We would work on EDI transaction sets. Select 1 or more to work on. We need to develop an agenda. All are invited to send proposed topics to Bruce Bargmeyer. Goal: get 1 or more transaction sets into a data registry. We could break into workgroups to address more than one transaction set. Potential participants are invited to propose a transaction set for their area of interest.

5. DoD Environmental Security information and the Defense Data Dictionary System (DISA)

Marilyn Slater described the content and procedures for standardizing environmental data in the DDDS. This helped to advance the understanding of the committee members in the operations of the DDDS and the DoD data stewardship program. A meeting was held December 12, 1997 with DoD DISA and Deputy UnderSecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) staff to discuss their participation in L8 and collaboration with reference data registry efforts. There was general interest. Another meeting is scheduled for January 12, 1998, to be held at the Environmental Protection Agency.

6. Date Standard

A meeting was held December 12, 1997 at DoD/DISA to discuss the date standard. Phong Ngo lead the meeting to a successful resolution of the issues. L8 will continue to progress the standard as passed. DoD may engage the committee on future potential revisions of Date and other standards.

8. Future meeting schedule

January 23-24, 1998 at NIST - L8 SIG

February 20, 1998 at NIST- Informal SC30/WG1 and SC/14 + others interested SC32 premeeting

February 23-25, 1998 at NIST - SC32 Planning Meetings

March 2-6, 1998, Meet with BSR production team

April 15-17, 1998 Metadata Workshop

Directions to NIST North: NIST North is Building 820. The address of this building is 820 West Diamond Avenue. Note that the building is located across the street from the main campus of NIST. Instead of turning onto Bureau Drive toward the main Gate of NIST, turn the opposite direction (North) onto Bureau Drive and take the second possible right turn to get to the NIST North building, The building has the name ANIST@ on it in large letters. (From Interstate 270, driving North, take Exit 10, which loops under the freeway, and then turn RIGHT at the first stop light--this is the intersection of West Diamond Avenue and Bureau drive.)

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X3L8 documents, including this meeting report, are available via Anonymous FTP from speckle.ncsl.nist.gov. Change directory to X3L8 (X3L8 in lower case letters) and check the "readme" file for details. Many of the documents are also listed on the X3L8 Home Page URL is Ahttp://www.lbl.gov/~olken/X3L8". If you have questions or comments on this document send email to Abargmeyer.bruce@epamail.epa.gov@.