SUO: Vote 2001-02: IFF Foundation Ontology
ATTN Voting Members of the SUO WG,
1. Please immediately acknowledge receipt of this email letter ballot. If I
do not receive such acknowledgement within 5 days, I will contact you again.
We want to make sure all voting members receive this ballot.
2. This message is to ballot the question, as proposed by Robert Kent:
"Should the IEEE P1600.1 Standard Upper Ontology Working Group commence work
on the IFF Foundation Ontology version 1.0 [July 20, 2001] posted at
http://suo.ieee.org/Kent-IFF.pdf, with the intent of developing it into the
final SUO document?
Note 1: See the background information below for more details.
Note 2: This may be one of several candidate documents, any one of which may
become the final SUO document, or may be combined and aligned into the final
SUO document via the consensus building process. No one candidate document
will have preferential status relative to the others."
3. By Thursday, August 30, 2001, please vote YES (comments optional),
NO(comments required), or ABSTAIN (comments optional). Votes should be sent
directly to me (to reduce list traffic), but please post your comments
directly to the list so they have a chance to be resolved. Comments sent to
me will be forwarded to the SUO list.
4. Per the SUO Chair's interpretation of Robert's Rules of Order (with input
from members of the SUO P&P Subgroup), the following items will be followed:
This vote will pass if it receives a majority of YES vs. NO votes. ABSTAINS
and non-votes are not counted in determining majority. The Chair may vote to
make or break a tie. As all voting members will have received and
acknowledged receipt of this ballot and will therefore have an opportunity
to vote, there will be no quorum of votes required for this motion to be
determined. None of these items are considered to be changes to existing
policies and procedures, only interpretations.
5. Non-voting participants are welcome to express opinions and submit
comments to the SUO list.
6. Background:
a. The purpose of this vote is to determine the level of consensus we have
for focusing work on this document. In other words, we need to decide if we
are going to go down this path or not. A working group may decide to work on
more than one document.
b. The primary purpose of this vote is NOT to propose improvements to the
document, unless they are major enough for you to vote against focusing work
on this document. However, such general improvement comments are welcome and
will be resolved (but not unless and until the vote passes, since there
would be no sense resolving comments if the group does not want to proceed
with this document.
c. If this vote passes, this document will change from being the work (and
under the control) of a group of individuals to being the work (and under
the control) of the SUO WG. A Technical Editor will be appointed or
elected, who will incorporate WG-approved changes into the document. This
does not require frequent formal votes for every change. A better approach
for daily or weekly updates is to develop consensus by resolving objections,
as we did when revising the Scope and Purpose. In other words, (1) the
Technical Editor leads the discussion by processing the issues and
suggestions; (2) the issues/suggestions identify proposed additions,
changes, or deletions to the wording in the document; (3) the Technical
Editor asks the WG for any objections. Items that do not have clear
consensus would be accumulated for later, more formal processing, i.e., the
proposer of the issue/suggestion is responsible for making a formal proposal
(with a WG vote) for the proposed change.
Jim Schoening
Chair, SUO WG