ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0080

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34

Information Technology ---

Document Description and Processing Languages

TITLE:	SC34 Comments on JTC1 N5296 and N5749
SOURCE:	SC34
PROJECT:	All SC34 projects
PROJECT EDITOR:	All SC34 editors
STATUS:
ACTION:	For information
DATE:
DISTRIBUTION:	SC34 and Liaisons
REFER TO:
REPLY TO:	Dr. James David Mason (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 Chaiman) Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Information Management Services 1060 Commerce Park, M.S. 6480 Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6480 U.S.A. Telephone: +1 423 574-6973 Facsimile: +1 423 574-0004 Network: [email protected] http://www.jtc1sc34.org/wg4/ ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/wg4/

The second meeting of the ISO IEC UN/ECE Management Group instructed JTC1 SCs to review their MoU work descriptions (JTC1 N5497) to ensure that its activities are properly reflected.

SC34 notes that SC34's work has not been referenced in A.11, which seeks to cover standards bodies responsible for Technical Documentation. Given the leading role of SC34 standards in this area this omission is to be regretted, especially given the HLSGC recognition (covered in Annex 2) of the importance of Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs) which are generally developed using SC34 standards. It is noted that Annex 2 references many of SC34's standards despite this omission.

JTC1 SC34 also notes that neither the MoU or the ISO BT-EC Report to JTC1: Work on Electronic Commerce standardization to be intitiated (JTC1 N5296) makes significant mention of the increaingly important role of the W3C subset of the SC34's ISO/IEC 8879 standard, the Extensible Markup Language (XML), in the interchange of business messages.

SC34 members are working, through the CEN/ISSS Electronic Commerce Workshop, on harmonization of XML encoding of electronic business messages according the the rules being developed for the ISO Basic Semantics Register (ISO TC154) and STEP (ISO TC184). This involves liaison with UN/EDIFACT through UN/CEFACT. SC34 notes that there is an increasing need for harmonization with these activities and others relating to Electronic Commerce mentioned in N5296, and is actively working on acheiving such harmonization. In particular items C.4, C.5, C.6 and C.7 in the proposed list of high priority work items prepared by the ISO BT-EC are likely to be relevant to SC34.