We agree with the aim of making the standard capable of providing multi-lingual (and non-English-language) data. We would also strongly encourage a greater focus on translating key documentation (codelists, guidance, and communications materials) into other languages, beginning with French.

However, we are nervous about these changes at this point, because of potential adjustment costs and/or breaking existing data, as well as creating additional barriers to using this data (new and existing user interfaces would require different ways of handling version 1.x and 2.x data). It would be worth exploring whether the intended benefits could be achieved simply by translating the required codelists into other languages.

We would suggest some short analysis is conducted on the costs of adjustment for publishers and the recurrent costs to consumers, and that a clearer outline of the potential benefits is provided.

Based on the strong consensus in Montreal we will be going ahead with this. 

This was a quick decision I made, in order to get a concrete proposal onto the website. My reasoning was:

• start- should be before end-
• The two -actual dates and the two -planned dates should be grouped together.

However, I'm happy to accept an alternative numbering.

As a non-technical contributor to this discussion, Ben's proposal seems sensible to me (delete rather than deprecate). It would be interesting to know why there is a preference for deprecation and if Ben's concern that this will make it more difficult for publishers to update 2.01 needs further discussion. A list of pros and cons would be useful to guide the discussion.

Note that the proposal is now for the integer upgrade to delete, not deprecate fileds. See discussion here - http://support.iatistandard.org/entries/78002476-Delete-previously-...