The ALA Voting Representative to NISO, Cindy Hepfer, has passed on a request for comment with a very short review turnaround. ISO/DIS 12620, Terminology and other language and content resources–Specification of data categories and management of a Data Category Registry for language resources is out for ballot and Cindy needs comments by this Friday (yes, Friday, Oct. 17). She sent it out a week ago, right after she got the notification from NISO, but it hit my inbox while I was down for the count, virally speaking, so most of the delay is my fault–mea culpa!
From Cindy’s mail: “The scope note in the draft standard reads as follows: “This International Standard provides guidelines concerning constraints related to the implementation of a Data Category Registry (DCR) applicable to all types of language resources, e.g., terminological, lexicographical, corpus-based, machine translation, etc. It specifies mechanisms for creating, selecting and maintaining data categories, as well as an interchange format for representing them.”
She further notes: “This is a ballot from TC37 / SC3 (Terminology and other language and content resources / Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content). Since TC46 / SC9 has a liaison with this committee, NISO can send in vote recommendations and comments. Ballot options are Yes, No or Abstain. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider ALA’s feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.”
ALA members who are interested in reviewing the standard must obtain it via Cindy. She can be contacted by email at: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Please copy me on your request (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so I can track activity emanating from the blog.
Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator