[emergency] Principles underlying Requirements

I would like to offer a relatively simple set of principles that may
help to focus deliberations on Requirements. Although such principles
may be almost "obvious", my sense is that we would do well to agree on
general principles before thrashing out detailed technical agreements.

The attached two-page document was adopted on July 12, 2002 among the
participants in the Disaster Management e-Government initiative. The
document lays out in general terms an approach to interoperability,
such as a statement that "interoperability agreements must be driven
by specific needs as they are identified at the interfaces among
active participants".

The agreement also asserts five more specific principles (including
the applicable international standards):

   1. Avoid non-standard data syntaxes
   2. Register the semantics of shared data elements
   3. Document service interfaces in a standard way
   4. Implement the standard interface for information discovery
   5. Implement the standard interfaces for geospatial data

The document concludes with a brief discussion of some key requirements
under United States public policy, which are very pertinent whenever
U.S. Federal government information is entailed.

Eliot