DASC Rosetta Study Group Meeting Minutes
Thu Nov 15 16:00:00 CST 2006
Chair: Perry Alexander
Recording Secretary: David Barton
Attendance Record: (* - attending, x - absent)
* Perry Alexander
* Peter Ashenden
* David Barton
* Nicolas Frisby
* Grant Martin
* Jennifer Streb
* Alex Zamfirescu

Perry then began the official meeting.  He first appointed a
secretary; David Barton volunteered for this, and will serve for the
near future.

The first item on the agenda was a review of the guidelines.  They are
on the Standards webpage.  They  seem to be fairly standard, and Perry
invited everyone to look at them.   Perry spoke of IEC TC93, and Grant
identified  it as  International Electromagnetic  Commission Technical
Committee  93.  Perry  asked if  we need  to have  a liason  with this
committee.  Alex  said that  he is the  lisason for the  committee, so
this  seems to  be covered.   If we  are to  go through  to  become an
international standard, we will need this liason.  Alex volunteered to
serve in this capacity, and Perry was happy to accept.

We must provide a list of members, the minutes of meetings, and other
material.  The URL for this is www.sldl.org .  There is a link at the
top of the page for standards; the draft PAR is at the top of the
page.

We need letters of assurance from patentholders and letters of
copyright for IP; we can take care of this as necessary.  Peter will
donate any copyright, since he wrote most of the current language.

Finally, we need to have a project schedule, and we will come up with
that.

The guidelines also require us to consider a number of issues; none of
these seem to be difficult to satisfy, but we need to make sure we
consider all of them in the report we submit to the DASC.

We then moved on to the draft PAR.  Dave Barton and Perry Alexander
prepared this with Victor's input, and it is on the Rosetta web site.
There was a bit of confusion in this, which was simply technical.  The
group then discussed the PAR in a general way.  This particularly
included the purpose and scope of the standard.

Alex suggested keeping the scope and the purpose very separate, and
keeping the purpose sharp and crisp.  Perry was keeping notes on the
PAR, and took the action item to update the PAR for the next meeting.

Alex asked about the exact content of the language reference.  Perry
replied that the current standard uses a co-algebra, which has many
applications.  Alex is concerned about normative versus examples, and
Peter answered that there are static and dynamic semantics.  Alex is
concerned about the scope, and we will try to make the scope
appropriately.

Peter asked if DASC is the right place.  A general consensus was that
DASC is where we are comfortable, and even in the present environment
can be used.  Peter suggested that a more broad committee might be
more appropriate, but the consensus still seemed to be under the DASC.

Perry asked Peter about the current standard.  The standard is still
incomplete; facets are still incomplete, but most of the standard is
narrowed down and there.  A lot of the standard is described
reflectively, in Rosetta, in a two step process of transformation.
Peter thinks we need to review that now, and it may be better to do
something a bit less formal.  This may require the inclusion of some
normative text as explanation.  Dave brought up the possibility of
normative explanation that disagrees with the formal explanation, and
this was discussed to an extent.

Perry drew the meeting to a close by reviewing action items.  Alex
will give PAR inputs.  Perry will edit it and make it available.  The
only other thing we need is a project schedule; Peter and Perry will
work on this.

We will meet on the first week of December.  Perry will send out the
exact date.  Perry will also be giving a presentation to the DASC
tomorrow, and will let us know how that goes.

Alex brought up probable questions, like industry support.  Perry said
we don't have big three support, but we have a lot of small company
support.