SUO Home
Scope and Purpose
How to Participate
How we do Business
Resolutions
Members Area
Expert Contributions
Ontology References
Links to related work
Start Documents
IFF
Lattice of Theories
OpenCYC
SUMO
4D Ontology
MSO
IEEE P1600.1
Standard Upper Ontology Working Group (SUO WG)
How We Do Business
Search IEEE
Authority
The SUO WG operates under the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) and is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Standards Activities Board.
The authorisation for this project comes from the Project Authorisation Request (PAR), which was approved on 2000-12-07.
Procedures
We operate under the Procedures of the IEEE SA can be found here. Of particular relevance are the IEEE Standards Companion, and the IEEE Standards Style Manual.
Formal business of the SUO WG is conducted under Robert's Rules of Order (RRO). An IEEE presentation of RRO can be found here. A public domain version or RRO can be found here.
One deviation from the normal use of RRO is in the counting of votes. IEEE has announced the following new rule for counting email ballots:
YES > 0.5*VOTING MEMBERS
This means that abstaining, acknowledging (but not voting),
and not
responding are all effectively "NO" votes.
In practice this makes being a responsible voting member more
onerous
than in the past, when if you were not interested, or not bothered
about
a particular vote, you could acknowledge but not vote, and you
would not
be counted in the ballot.
If you have consistently not voted in ballots we suggest either:
1. (Preferably) you take a more active interest in the work
of the Group
and vote (YES or NO) in ballots.
2. You consider removing yourself from the voting membership
(which in no
other way limits your participation in the Group). You may regain
voting
rights at any time by making a request to the Chair.
In addition:
- When a change is made in the way we do business (e.g. policy on adding or removing voting members) then a two thirds majority is required.
- When the Draft Standard is voted on under the IEEE SA a majority of 75% is required.
Voting Membership
A list of SUO voting members is at http://suo.ieee.org/SUO/documents/voting-members.txt.
Voting membership can be attained by completing an application form (see below), participating in the work of this group, and waiting for 6-months (from date of application). Participation might be in the form of subscribing to the standard-upper-ontology email discussion list (see How to Participate) (Caution, this list can see some 100+ messages per week), or by periodically (every month or two) providing comments on documents in development.
Application form: Download the form as an MS Exel Spreadsheet here, (this is NOT an online form), save to your disk, fill in the 13 fields, and email to Jim.S3@juno.com. If you are unable to download or open this Excel spreadsheet, send an email to the same address with the following information: First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name, Company, Add1, Add2, City, State, Zip, Country, Phone, FAX, Email, IEEE Member #(not required).
SUO WG voting members who do not acknowledge or cast a vote in 2 successive ballots shall be removed from the list of voting members. They will be informed of this action, provided they can be reached. Such individuals may immediately regain voting rights by making a request of the Chair.
Note: "... do not acknowledge or cast a vote..." means those that do neither, rather than meaning than just not casting a vote can lead to removal from the voting list.