Fw: RE: Responding to comments from Switzerland on Part4 DCOR

[MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)]

Here is a proposed reply to the comments from Switerland on Part 4 DCOR1.
I'm grateful to UK.

Cheers,
Makoto

Forwarded by "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp>
----------------------- Original Message -----------------------
 From:    "Francis Cave" <francis at franciscave.com>
 To:      "'MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)'" <eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp>
 Cc:      "'Horton, Gareth'" <Gareth_Horton at datawatch.com>,
          "'Alex Brown'" <alexb at griffinbrown.co.uk>,
          "Inigo Surguy" <inigo.surguy at gmail.com>
 Date:    Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:09:47 -0000
 Subject: RE: Responding to comments from Switzerland on Part4 DCOR
----

Dear Murata-san

The UK committee has approved the following text as a draft response to the
Swiss comments on Part 4, with specific reference to the issue of serial
dates.

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The BRM decided that Part 4 should enable faithful representation of all
features found in documents created in legacy systems, but whose use in
implementations of the standard is to be discouraged and have therefore been
excluded from Part 1.

The BRM also decided that ISO 8601 should be used throughout ISO/IEC 29500
for the representation of dates and times.

it was not realised at the time that the decision to mandate the use of ISO
8601 dates and times was made without checking that this would be
implementable in all circumstances and compatible with the decision on
faithful representation of all features in legacy documents.

The final text of the standard does not explain how to implement ISO 8601
for the representation of dates and times in several critical circumstances,
such as in spreadsheet formulae, and a defect report was submitted to this
effect (DR-09-0275). When this Working Group considered how to address this
defect report, it became clear that significant technical work would be
needed to determine which of the various options for date and time
representation in ISO 8601 are suitable for use throughout ISO/IEC 29500.
Furthermore, in order to represent dates and times in ISO 8601 in all
circumstances, it may well be necessary to add new features to ISO/IEC 29500
to carry information that can be represented using the serial date formats
used by legacy systems but proves impossible to represent using ISO 8601.
The feasibility of using ISO 8601 for the representation of dates and times
in all circumstances, and without determination of which of the many format
options provided by ISO 8601 are applicable in each case, has not been
established.

This Working Group discussed whether to postpone fixing this defect until a
full technical solution could be found, or to reinstate the use of serial
date representations for legacy documents only. It was felt that a
postponement of this issue would effectively mean that  ISO/IEC 29500
remains un-implementable for an important class of applications in which
date and time representation is a critical requirement, especially for
spreadsheet applications. 

The Working Group views the reinstatement of serial dates to be a
technically reliable way of ensuring that legacy documents can be faithfully
represented in conformance with Part 4 of ISO/IEC 29500. The Working Group
remains committed to bring forward further corrections or amendments to
ISO/IEC 29500, to enable Part 1 of the standard to be implemented using ISO
8601 for representation of dates and times in all circumstances as far as is
technically feasible.

The Swiss National Body is encouraged to nominate experts as members of this
Working Group, to contribute to the resolution of this and other remaining
defects in ISO/IEC 29500.

-----

I hope this will be a useful contribution to WG 4's work next week on the
disposition of comments on the DCOR ballots.

Regards,

Francis


Francis Cave
Chairman, BSI Technical Committee IST/41

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