LCC_ — The spec should document the process for maintaining currency

There should be an annex to explain the approach to reflecting updates from ISO e.g. subscribing to ISO notifications and raising issues reflecting the changes. There should also be targets for frequency/lead time/

The spec should document the process for maintaining currency

Members of the FTF agree that maintaining currency is an issue. For the purposes of the FTF, the OMG has subscribed to the ISO Online Catalog for the ISO 3166 codes specifically, although that subscription will expire sometime in 2018. The ISO 639 language codes appear to change less frequently than the country codes, and so for the time being, and it’s not clear that one can subscribe to ISO for those, although it might be possible to subscribe to SIL for the 639-3 codes. Our current recommendation is that the OMG continue to subscribe to the ISO online catalog so that the LCC RTF can be automatically notified of changes to the ISO 3166 codes and revise the LCC specification to incorporate such changes as appropriate. The RTF should also plan to review any modifications to the language codes when planning an update to the country codes, and make any required changes as needed.

Having said this, the FTF also recognized the need to automate generation of the codes themselves to facilitate such revisions. As a part of the resolution to this issue, the FTF has produced a set of instructions and scripts to fully automate generation of the ISO 3166-1, ISO 3166-2, and corresponding U.N. M49 region codes. We recommend that these instructions and scripts be included in an informative annex to the specification for use by future RTFs. We also recommend that in the future, RTFs consider augmenting the scripts to automate generation of the language codes, possibly including other parts of the 639 standard, if requested by LCC users and given that potential intellectual property issues with SIL can be addressed. Given that the process is fully automated, it should be possible to revise the codes within a meeting cycle of notification of a change.

The resolution to this issue introduces a new Annex C, Generating Ontologies from External Code Definitions, together with four informative machine-readable files that contain the scripts used to generate the current set of normative country and region codes.

It depends on the resolution to issue LCC-16 and on the resolutions on which LCC-16 depends for revisions to the Country Representation and Language Representation ontologies that are required for automated code generation.