guidelines and procedures for IVOA document management

Jonathan McDowell jcm at head.cfa.harvard.edu
Tue Mar 16 07:48:06 PST 2004


Bob, I think the draft seems mostly reasonable. A couple of points:
 - on the format of dates like "15 Mar 2004": it has been standard in
astronomy for at least a century to write "2004 Mar 15", which has the
merits of being Europe/US-neutral and in the same order as ISO-8601
but more readable.
 - on watermarks: my own experience is that when online, it is easy enough
just to go to the depository to get the latest version of the doc, the
problem arises when you have a hardcopy - or, usually in my case, 15
hardcopies all slightly different - and its origin is unclear. In that
case the digital watermark doesn't help. I fear adding non-trivial overhead
to the process in a way that won't actually help much.
 I think the introduction of the Working Group Working Draft (what has been
called Internal Draft up to now, which I mildly prefer) solves a lot
of the problem if we are disciplined enough to use it.

  - Jonathan



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