Biosphere Data Project

Standards Development

(scope: informatics standards, not environmental standards)

Recent conference of interest:

Open Forum on Metadata Registries, Santa Fe, January 17-21, 2000

"Beyond the descriptions of the official standards procedures and anecdotal evidence about some of the problems...we have little understanding of the entire process of 'standards development.'" - William Moen

The Standards Development Process

In fact, there is no one standards development process. There are a great many different standards development efforts, each of which is generally a process unto itself. More attention is now beginning to be paid to understanding how standards are developed for both information technology and information management systems.

Dialogue about standards development is an essential part of the Biosphere Data Project. Coordinating among standards projects with diverse purposes is not a simple task, however. Standards already exist to act as a bridge between multiple domains, multiple worksites and/or ways of working. As Susan Leigh Star and others have pointed out, standards serve as the infrastructure or boundary objects in networks of practical activity. What all this means is that standards must strike a balance between providing enough structure to translate meaningfully between domains and enough wiggle room so that the people in each individual setting can adapt and improvise in response to their individual situation.

One goal of the dialogue on this site might be to create a useful classification scheme for informatics standards and protocols that are relevant to environmental data development. If you have any comments or suggestions for this process please email us or, better yet, post them to the Forum where others can respond. With your help we can create a much richer resource, one that explicates and shares the latest news about the evolution of environmental informatics standards.

All of the resources on the Metadata and XML pages should be useful in understanding different aspects of standards development, as should the presentations from the Metadata Registries Conference cited above.

Some good introductory links include:

XML, Standards and You by Edd Dumbill - part of a special issue of xml.com on standards.

Metadiversity - Biodiversity Metadata Conference proceedings from NFAIS, November 9-12, 1998.

Taxonomic Authority Files Workshop on managing species-level biological data, June 22 - 23, 1998.

The State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, April 1999 describes the situation just before the 7th Dublin Core workshop.
The 7th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop, October 25-27, 1999.

Frank Halasz, in "Seven Issues": Revisited (1991), discusses the importance of abstraction and conceptual work, rather than a purely technical approach, in the creation of standards:

I'd like to make a plea for standards based on well-articulated models, not necessarily formal models, but the models have to be well-articulated….our field will change rapidly and the standards need to change along with it and it the standard is all details and no abstraction you won't be able to modify your standard appropriately.

And as an aside, reading the above-linked transcript of Halasz's talk is a great way to take a trip back in time almost ten years. It's an overview of the state of Hypertext research just prior to the emergence of the Web. (The Web was actually demo'd at that conference and gets a brief mention near the end of the talk.) There are a lot of roads not taken and a lot of useful ideas in that "old" research.