Provenance: The WG chair perspective

[Laurent Michel]

Dear DMers,

I really regret to see such dissensions exposed on the list.

For one year, the Provenance project has been progressing thanks to fragile hard-won compromises, but today it seams to be near 
collapsing. It's a great pity as we are now dealing with the last small details.

A 2 folds issue
===============

  1) THE VO PERSPECTIVE: A huge amount of time has been spent by many people for Provenance (editor, authors, chairs -thanks 
Mark-, TCG members, VO community and finally the institutions supporting the VO). Meanwhile, we have Meas/Coord/Trans, 
DatasetMetadata, CubeDM, TimeSeries, SourceDM waiting in the Panama canal (most of the Provenance people are also involved in 
other WGs). We cannot use all of our resources to polish one standard. I consider as my responsibility to check that the VO 
manpower is fairly engaged for the DM business and that on-going efforts are not wasted.

  2) THE PROVENANCE PERSPECTIVE: The Provenance status has been WD for one month, this means that the authors agreed with the 
text and presented it to the community, ready to receive any input from the DM-WG members.
We are however in an odd situation where one contributor plays both roles (author and WG contributor); consequently the 
discussion between authors continues as if we were not in WD review process. This is a fact, this is blocking.

What to do next
===============
Taking all of this into account and seeing that during the WD stage, the editor, Mathieu Servillat, did his best to incorporate 
comments in the text and publicly released the change list, that fixes typos and obvious inconsistencies, but respects the 
integrity of the submitted WD, I thus consider that the standard is ready to go for a second PR round.
Furthermore, the Standard and Doc says clearly that the text can still be amended during this review.
If this couldn't occur, then Provenance has to be moved backward to the end of the queue.

Any comment is welcome.

Regards
Laurent
-- 
jesuischarlie/Tunis/Paris/Bruxelles/Berlin

Laurent Michel
SSC XMM-Newton
Tél : +33 (0)3 68 85 24 37
Fax : +33 (0)3 )3 68 85 24 32
Université de Strasbourg <http://www.unistra.fr>
Observatoire Astronomique
11 Rue de l'Université
F - 67200 Strasbourg