Workshop on Understanding International Relations via Effective Standardization
June 29-30, 2010, Gaithersburg, MD
This paper shows two regional standardization activities, CJK-DOCP and DocSII, taken by Asian countries for contribution to JTC1 international standardization and for clarification of Asian specific issues on document processing technology.
In the JTC1/SC18/WG8 meeting held in France, Prof. C. C. Hsieh (Taiwan), Prof. S. Y. Lee (Korea) and I met and identified the requirements for CJK discussion on document processing that includes Asian specific issues.
note1: JTC1/SC18/WG8 is today's JTC1/SC34
note2: JTC1/SC18: Document Processing and Related Communication
note3: SC18/WG8: Document description and processing languages
They hold the 1st meeting in July 1992, Japan, and confirmed the plan of collaboration for CJK and other East Asian countries. They positioned their discussion in CJK-DOCP as a preliminary works for their national standards associated SC18/WG8 development or for submitting to SC18/WG8.
Standardization for East Asian document processing technology required for international document interchange, in particular, among Asia Pacific countries, intending to apply ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 developed standards to East Asian document environments.
Some CJK discussions were submitted to SC18 and included in the SC18 developed standards and their Amd/Cor, e.g.,
Synchronization with SC18 developments is illustrated in the Table 1.
Table 1 Synchronization with SC18 developments
Meeting by meeting the number of members increased and western members (most of them were experts on Asian issues) jointed as well.
The CJK-DOCP was a pure informal group and all the CJK-DOCP members participated to the meetings for their technical interests. Nobody represented their firms and organization. In CJK-DOCP, Prof. C. C. Hsieh of China/Taiwan and Prof. S. Y. Lee of Korea played the leading roles in particular for Chinese issues and Korean issues respectively.
The CJK-DOCP was ended due to the retirements of some key persons.
CJK DOCP was a non-profit open group consists of experts who were interested in:
Accordingly the CJK-DOCP membership included experts from
CJK DOCP takes liaisonship with:
ISO/IEC JTC1 standards are developed enough generically to be applied to a number of applications in a number of countries. When actually using them, we face to some requirements for subsetting or profiling.
As a national issue, we will do it within a domestic committee. However as an Asian regional issue, we have to do it by the discussion of experts from related countries.
The Asian specific issues in document processing and interchange based on ISO/IEC developed standards are:
Some distributed documents within 10th through 14th CJK-DOCP are available on the web:
DocSII was organized by Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, Today's METI) in 2002 to make a good collaboration for drafting International Standards on document processing including Asian document processing.
In accordance with the original plan, it was ended in 2004.
DocSII intends to solve the problem with supports of document style/layout experts in Asian countries.
DocSII collects style/layout rules employed in Asian countries and systematically classify the formatting objects.
DocSII creates a style language library. Using the library, style specification can be carried out without particular expertise of style/layout rules and style languages.
DocSII submits the library to the ISO requesting an international approval. The internationally approved library will contribute to much more document users in the world.
The discussions in the DocSII resulted in the publication of three amendments to ISO/IEC TR 19758 (DSSSL library for complex compositions) and resulted in the submission of a New Work Item Proposal (NP) for "Minimum requirements for specifying document rendering systems". After the DocSII ended, the NP was accepted and SC34 developed ISO/IEC 24754.
Table 2 Synchronization with SC18 developments
In DocSII, however, China and Korean took few important roles. At the time, China, Japan and Korea were P-members in SC34 and they were able to propose their comments to SC34 directly. Other Asian countries were not members of SC34 and DocSII collected their comments and submitted them to SC34. Therefore in DocSII, those countries were very active.
In DocSII, all the traveling fee was supported by Japanese government. Participant were dispatched from their organizations or governments from their standardization strategic points of view.
Under the control of MITI, Center of the International Cooperation for Computerization (CICC) arranged all the membership and meetings taking contact with the governments of Asian countries:
note4: An existing example of style language library is ISO/IEC TR 19758.
All the distributed documents of DocSII are available on the web:
http://www.y-adagio.com/public/committees/docsii/index.htm