S1000D - "sense out of confusion"

Survey so far

2011-04-04T14:30:00.000Z

Some of you may remember that last October I introduced a new survey to the Blog in an attempt to get a handle on the usage of the various issues of S1000D.

Well we are approximately 6 months on and the results are very interesting given the relatively low registration rate.

The Results

What S1000D Issue are you using?

The results so far are very interesting and are summarised in the following table.

S1000D Issue	Percentage
Issue 1 Change 6	27
Issue 1 Change 7	7
Issue 1 Change 8	13
Issue 1 Change 9	40
Issue 2 Change 0	13

You will obviously note that there is no reported usage for anything after Issue 2 Change 0 and I know that not to be the case. I guess that this reflects the low number of responses so far.

I am going to leave the survey on the Blog and I will continue to monitor the situation (see comments below)

Are you using a CSDB

The second question relates to the usage of a CSDB and the result is:

70% Yes

30% No

This result shows that the managers responsible for the projects realise that to control the creation and editing of large number of Data Modules (or even a relatively small number as well) really does require some help more than a spreadsheet.

The Survey area of the Blog Page

One problem that may be causing the low response to the Blog Survey is the length of time that the actual survey takes to open. It is located at the bottom of the Blog Page and many may not spot it opening up.

I have to admit that whilst the survey plug-in is not very good, it was the best that was available that had no cost attached to it.

Just in case some of you have not yet seen the Survey pages I have included them here.

Page 1 of the Survey
What version of S1000D are you using?

Page 2 of the Survey
Are you using a CSDB?

However, before you get to this stage the plug-in has to start-up and that is not all that obvious. Below is part of the start up sequence.

There are other parts to this sequence but it can take quite a few seconds to get started and this is obviously dependant to some extent on the speed of your internet connection and how fast your machine is.

So that we can get a better idea of usage, if you have not already done so, please visit the survey and make your mark.

S1000D Conference in the UK

2011-03-15T15:13:00.000Z

I have received notice of a UK S1000D conference on 24th May 2011. It is some years since we had a conference here specifically covering S1000D. Because it is a one day event it will make it more available to users, managers and planners who are, or who are going to be, involved in S1000D projects.

This conference is known as Congility S1000D and is going to be part of the three-day Congility 2011 event.

The event is being organised by Congility which was previously known as X-Pubs and the page specific to this conference can be found at http://www.congility.com/index.php/2011/S1000D/.

In the past this organisation has put on some really good events and it looks as if this one is going to be no exception.

Not only will the conference cover the S1000D Specification but also contain sessions on other ASD Specifications which are becoming increasingly important. I understand that the conference is going to be held in the Gatwick area so there will be plenty of parking and it is relatively easy to to get to (plenty
of signs!).

I will try and keep you up to date about the latest situation regarding speakers etc as I get them.

Business Rules White Paper

2011-03-07T17:36:00.000Z

A little while ago Corena made available a White Paper which provides guidelines for working with the S1000D Business Rules. The paper also provides some useful guidance on the difference between the Business Rules and the BREX S1000D Data Module.

Also covered are some good guidelines for developing the business rules which are, in this time of confusion in some areas, very welcome.

Although it is a good start there are some areas where I think that some extra consideration should be given and also a small error.

A Small Error

Early on in the White Paper, and again later on, the statement is made that the BREX is an XML file. This is not quite true.

The BREX Data Module was introduced into the SGML and XML structures at Issue 2 Change 3. At that time most people were still working in SGML. So from that point until Change 4 this Data Module was available in SGML and XML. Of course with Issue 4 the scene changed and now only XML is supported (probably a good thing given the problems of keeping both streams in line).

In contacts that I have it is fairly clear that although there is a gradual move away from SGML to XML. When the XML schema was first made available the average XML Editor package was pretty poor and apart from a couple were certainly not Industrial Strength. I watched many projects go awry when developers thought that they could develop some processing applications without a full knowledge of ISO 8879 (the Bike Pack still contains the result of software used for formatting the underlying XML file which does not produce an output which is what the author intended - See WYSINWYE Part 1).

Granted the XML version of the BREX has a much greater potential for integration into the editing environment for real time rules checking and we look forward to seeing more of those applications.

Business Rules Creation

Basic Starting Point

If there is a flaw in the White Paper it is that it does not highlight enough the need for the Business Rules to be written by someone who fully understands

the technical publications process, and
the S1000D Specification.

Too many Business Rules documents contain basic errors which show that the authors are lacking knowledge in the two areas above.

One document that I came across in the 90's had so many errors that it was very difficult to work with. Another contained practices which flew completely against the S1000D basic concept of not having duplicate material by having the same information (a very common component in a large system) scattered around the Project Breakdown each with its own Data Module code (including the subordinate data modules for parts lists, maintenance etc.) based on where it was in the system.

The contracting company had pointed this out to the Design Authority but to no avail and as a result included a table in each Data Module to indicate where else the component was used and the data module code of the Module.

The Business Rules Team

I like the fact that the concept of a team in introduced. Again it is important that the members of that team are practitioners and not managers. In the history of publications too many documents are/have been put together by managers who have been promoted to their post from outside the department (at the risk of being a bit contentious [not for the first time] the S1000D Specification in some areas displays the problem of the Specification Authors not coming from a publications background).

I know that in the list of mistakes highlighted towards the end the White Paper does put this as number three. Perhaps it should have been more specifically pointed out earlier on.
At the risk of attracting more flak again, I am not sure about the team containing a Graphics Expert and a member of the Web Delivery Team.

The Graphics conforming to S1000D specifies the various parameters for the graphics so that they can conform and give a consistent feel across several projects. We certainly see a wide range of graphics which do not conform. On this front I have recently heard about a plug-in for Iso-Draw which is, if you like, a S1000D business rules checker for CGM graphics (and anything else produced in Iso-Draw for that matter) and I look forward to seeing it in action in the near future.

As far as web delivery is concerned, having S1000D data modules should be a good solid start for a Web output system. The DMs are consistent (they will fail if they do not comply with the specification) if the editor package has a conforming parser integrated with it.

Different Types of Data Module

At the risk of being repetitive, new and experienced users of S1000D should bear in mind that although the number of data module types is increasing almost by the month, it is perfectly ok to use only those types which fit your requirement.

Again, at the risk of drawing flak, if you want to use a Descriptive Data Module to provide the Parts List because it is the best method for your project then do so. Let's be honest, the IPD is not the most intuitive Data Module type to author. Most projects that I have come across recently have specifically stated that the IPDs should be output from a Database.

It is a really excellent start

When all said and done Corena are to be congratulated for putting out such an excellent document which provides a good outline of what needs to be done and covered in producing Business Rules.

I think that this White Paper should be required reading for those who are involved in Business Rules production for new and existing projects.

WYSINWYE Part 2

2010-10-14T15:18:00.000Z

In the first part of this topic we saw how the underlying tagging up can affect what we see on the screen. In this, the second, part we can see the result of incomplete definition of graphic element reproduction attributes.

Defining Graphic Reproduction Measurements

In this part we have an incomplete data problem with the Issue 4 Bike Pack. We noticed it because the graphics appeared squashed in the editing environment as well as in our Handbook Production application.

I have included a screen shot of one of them here:

The problem here is that the mark up has included an actual dimension in one of the attributes for the graphic but not the other. The actual markup is as follows (I have removed a whole lot of the markup just leaving the
relevant part):

<figure id="fig-0001">
<title>Parts of the wheel</title>
<graphic infoEntityIdent="ICN-S1000DBIKE-AAA-DA00000-0-U8025-00504-A-04-1" reproductionWidth="510"/> </figure>

Here you can see the reproductionWidth attribute (shown in bold
above) has no matching reproductionHeight or reproductionScale attributes.

I guess the bottom line is that if your graphic is not shown
squashed your editor/viewing package is not working properly. And if it is
squashed, it is not your fault.

Have you spotted any anomalies?

What I have shared in these two parts of WYSINWYE is what I have
spotted just getting output from the supplied data.

Are there any other problems/strange behaviour that you have
encountered in your work with S1000D?

WYSINWYE - - Part 1

2010-10-12T16:57:00.000Z

Yes! You have seen it correctly. Not what one is normally used to seeing in the context of what you see is it? The abbreviation translates into "What You See Is Not What You Expect".

I guess that this Blog entry could be considered to be a wee bit "Nerdy" but I have done it because it may answer some questions that others may have been experiencing when using the BikePack package.

I have been testing an S1000D product and because we wish to make the results available to demonstrate some of the functionality that it has, and because a lot of the data that we have for this purpose belongs to our clients, I have been using, what else(?), the various S1000D Bike Pack sets of data available for download from the S1000D.org site.

In particular two problems came to light, sort of in your face type problems and I would like to share them with you because they both are as a result of the xml markup.

I have split this WYSINWYE subject into two parts, this one to do with ISO 8879 and the other (in Part 2) to do with graphics.

An ISO 8879 problem

Having built the Issue 3 Bike Pack (SGML version actually) into a publication I noticed some funny formatting associated with random lists (it may also affect ordered lists of course). I have included a screen shot of the output below.

From this you can probably see that the 'bullet' mark for each list item is way above the text. In fact the text is located on the next paragraph line.

Naturally, since we are in a testing frame of mind, the first thought is that there is something wrong with the application's formatting rules. A closer examination showed that this was not the case.

The next step is to look at the SGML and as you can see from the screen shot below this at first glance looks very good. Nicely formatted to make it more readable to the human eye (I have switched on the
display of tabs/spaces/cr's etc.).

And this is actually where the problem originates. The structure for the item contains mixed content as this fragment of the DTD (in Near&Far) shows.

So things are not quite what they seem when it comes to interpretation of the SGML itself. The basic problem here is that ISO 8879 says that if there is a record end between an element markup and another
element markup then the data will be displayed on the next line. (This is a simplified version of what is contained in ISO 8879 B.3.3.1).

By removing the 'record end' after the <item> tag the formatting is restored to what is expected in this case.

I guess that this problem will also affect XML as well as since XML is an ISO 8879 application but I have not gone looking for it.

A New Blog Survey

2010-10-04T07:57:00.002Z

Why?

For some time now we have had a small survey on this Blog which asks the fundamental question "are you using S1000D". More and more projects are demanding the use of S1000D. There are also a number of projects which, although not mandating S1000D, are actually using it because it makes good financial sense.
I thought that it was about time that we had a poll which enabled us to get an idea of the spread of usage.
You will see that I am using a third-party survey and this has some limitations as to width. As a result the survey can be found at the bottom of this Blog. The survey takes a moment or two to start up - please be patient.

What are we asking?

The questions are straightforward.

Which version or versions of S1000D are you using - multiple choice
Are you using a CSDB - single choice

Which version

An obvious Question given that S1000D has been in use for so long now. Also
You will be able to see the result of the answers pretty well straightaway.

Are you using a CSDB

Another obvious Question but one that needs to be asked. There does seem to be an assumption in some quarters that everyone is using a CSDB but I know from experience that this is not the case.

Why has the type of survey been changed?

Well, the problem with the survey that we have had on this Blog up to now is that the questions about S1000D only required one answer. Clearly with this new S1000D survey there was a need to provide for multiple selections.
I hope that this new S1000D Usage survey works as well as the other one. I will be monitoring it.
If you have any difficulties using it please let me know.

The end of another eventful year

2009-12-21T09:51:00.005Z

As the end of 2009 approaches I guess that we can reflect back at the S1000D Scene and reckon that a fair amount has happened.

Issue 4 has had a fix, other parts of the specification are being looked at for improvement, new areas of control and functionality(?) are being pursued.

ATA and S1000D

The ATA organisation (who appear to have taken over the organisation of S1000D related events) have announced their next forum which is to take place in May 2010 in Seattle (see the ATA Site via this link). The programme not surprisingly has yet to be finalised. In theircall for papers they pose the following questions:

Do you have solutions for particular technical or business problems you may have encountered?
Are you on the leading edge of implementing new standards?
Are you finding new and creative ways to broaden your implementation?
Are the ATA or S1000D standards a key component of your business strategy?

Clearly for some of us the fourth question has to be a resounding "Yes" so I guess that potentially there could be a number of papers here from organisations that are really using the specification for day to day work some of which is not defence industry biased. The big problem here is that those companies will be fully commercial organisations where there is no budget for taking part in the broader discussions. Perhaps it is time for another S1000D event in Europe.

S1000D Functionality

I have heard that due to the current complexity of Issue 4 there have been calls for a S1000D Lite.

I think that those making the call actually has lost sight of the fact that it is already there in the guise of Business Rules. In those rules for a project the actual structures to be used are defined.

There is a simple rule here: "If you don't want to use one of the 'new' S1000D bits then don't specify them in the Business rules". In fact why not specifically exclude them. If your delivery method does not need a flashy S1000D applicability processing, or your IETM only has to be a fairly basic S1000D application, or your output is paper based (yes there is an increasing user base who want paper - and they are not Luddites) then only use the parts of S1000D specification that will give you what you need.

So to the Break

So as we move towards the break and a new year may I wish you all the best of seasons greetings. I hope that those of you who do have a break at this time of year find it is refreshing and recuperating time.

I also hope that you will all find 2010 a more prosperous time as the world begins to settle down benefit from a more stable financial environment.

Users Forum

2009-10-14T08:31:00.002Z

I have had a slightly belated look at the S1000D User forum which is taking
place this week - indeed as I post this it is already Day 3 with plenty still to
come. I know that we have several people attending this event and I
have no doubt that they will be very pleased to see you (Mekon Stand).

What has interested me quite a lot is that S1000D does seem to be catching up with work carried out in the UK under the banner of the MoD Def Stan 00-60 specification. In that document the link was very firmly made between the ILS LSA (Mil Std 1388), S1000D Technical Documentation, and parts handling and organisation via S2000M.

Another interest which is highlighted by some of the sessions at the S1000D User Forum is the direction and some of the thinking behind some of the 'new features' of S1000D Issue 4 more of which another time.

Integration of Documentation

As part of the work with the UK MoD it became obvious fairly early on that the Def Stan 00-60 view of the processes involved in documentation was not as straightforward as originally intended. The content of the LSA database was nowhere near comprehensive enough for publications, it was in the wrong format and there was no space to store the data modules when they had been created. Several companies within the UK modified their LSA offerings to accommodate this information. I guess that yet again (flag waving here) the UK led the way and hopefully lessons learned here helped make the work coming up much easier and less painful.

Use the Forum Time Wisely

I guess what I will miss by not being at the User Forum is that networking with suppliers of technology and users.

There will be developments which I know I would have found exciting (but not be carried away by - perhaps I am a cynic at heart), users who have solved problems in novel ways who are prepared to talk about them and just those who are attending so that they can try to get to grips with this S1000D Specification.

When I go to exhibitions or conferences and look at what is on offer I have the following golden rules in place:

do not always believe what you hear
look carefully at what you are being shown
ask your obvious questions that closely affect your work
if something does not say that it does something then it almost certainly does not (first law of software supply - from bitter experience)

Enjoy!

US S1000D Event in October 2009

2009-06-22T09:16:00.004Z

An email Received here on Friday notified me of an S1000D event in the US. Called the 2009 S1000D User's Forum it is due to take place between 12th and 15th of October in Hilton Head, South Carolina, USA. It is being organised by the Aerospace Industries Association, one of the bodies responsible for the maintenance of the S1000D Specification.

Spread over the four days there are, as usual, several sessions and tracks.

Tracks

Day one is mainly set for tutorials and it will be interesting to see what topics they are to cover.

On day two one of the Tracks is focused on "Creating the Vision for Integrated Logist" (For those of you not familiar with this last word I looked it up to discover that it means "To perform logistics functions or processes. The act of planning, organizing and managing activities that provide goods or services" There is even a verb "to logist" - for those who wish to look further I have provided a link to the online source of my information at the bottom of this item.)

At long last it would seem that years after Def Stan 00-60 in the UK documented the links between the ILS world in the guise of Mil Std 1388, the S1000D specification and S2000M specification there is a public focus on the interoperability of these and other specifications. Sessions are given over to the linking of these and other specifications (S3000L, S4000M & S5000F. The session which covers the links between the various S Specifications ends in one called "How does the technical publication production benefit from the ASD suite of ILS Standards?" If there is not already one perhaps this session should form the basis of a specification in its own right which documents properly the links between them.

As one might expect there are reports (on the morning of day three) into updates on the progress(?) of S1000D.

Link

The above are some of the programme sessions that have caught my eye on a quick read through but if you wish to look at this more closely then the link to the 'front page' is "http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Invitation.aspx"

Attendance

I have heard reports from contacts that attendance of both the ATA and the previous S1000D conference was down from normal. I guess that if this is the case it reflects the hard economic times that we are going through.

Attendance at the full conference is shown as $450 (for a limited time) but of course one has to get there - a quick search reveals that from the UK a return flight would cost around $750.

Here in the UK the people who would most benefit from exposure to a conference of this type are employed by relatively small companies (e.g. < 100 staff). There is just not the spare money in circulation here to pay for this visit or even to warrant the loss of production which would happen from a person attending this event. UK technical publications contractors tend to be very lean organisations where every penny counts and where generally money is spent for the support of a contract.

My experience has been that any attempt by a contractor to introduce 'efficiencies' has been met with a corresponding demand from their clients to reduce the rates that they pay for the work to be done. I agree that this is short sighted. I would be interested to hear if this observation is still relevant (it was fairly recently supported in a conversation that I had).

I guess that this conundrum is something that we have to mull over and try to come up with some suitable answer.

UK Event

I have heard rumours on the grapevine that the UK even (recently postponed) has been rescheduled. More details when I get definite information.

Preston Event Cancelled

2009-05-21T15:31:00.002Z

It has come to my notice that the S1000D event scheduled to take place in Preston later this month has been cancelled.

This is a pity because in these straightened times it is very difficult for most of us involved in the S1000D community to travel outside the country in which we live.

I understand from a contact that the AIA event which took place in the States this year had an attendance which was quite a bit down on last year. Indeed I understand the the numbers were roughly half what they had been (I hope my information is more or less correct). Clearly the economic situation has affected pretty well all of us. (There are some notable exceptions in the UK of course - if you have been following the UK press revelations).

If there are any other conferences or get events that I hear about that are in any way related to the S1000D community, I will, of course, be putting details on this Blog. If you know of any which are taking place please let me know.

In the meantime we have noticed an increasing interest in S1000D here in the UK so perhaps the next level of users are rolling out - something positive in contrast with some of the doom and gloom of today.

An S1000D UK Event in May this year

2009-04-06T16:08:00.002Z

This Blog has been relatively quiet just lately. Not that there has been a dearth of things to comment on but mainly due to the generally busy-ness of your scribe. There are only so many hours in the day and I have to sharpen the chisel from time to time to start on a new block of stone.

I could not let this upcoming event go by without comment. Although I have nothing to do with its organisation I do recognise the value of these events.

In this time of financial uncertainty it is good to know that there is to be this event in the UK which is going to include the subject of S1000D as part of it's programme.

TechInfo 2009 is scheduled to take place on Monday 18th May and Tuesday 19th May at the Marriott Hotel in Preston. For a change the cost of the full package, both days and overnight accommodation, looks to be within the scope of probably most companies. The per day cost is extremely reasonable too. OK, so those not in the UK will need to get the the venue but it is not all that far from Manchester Airport (under 50 miles) to which most major airports have linking flights.

Although there is only one track through the conference it looks as if delegates will certainly find subjects to match their requirements. Of course one of the major factors making these events so useful is the 'Networking' which goes on outside the various sessions. There is always plenty of genuinely good unbiased advice available.

For those who want more details they can obtain more details by looking at www.techinfo.org.uk. I did notice that this link has been put onto the Blog page by Google ads.

Hopefully I will see you there.

S1000D Issue 4

2008-09-25T13:31:00.005Z

The long awaited ASD Issue 4 has now been released.

This issue marks a departure for ASD from their recent practise. They are only providing Schemas and no SGML or XML DTDs. I can't say I am too surprised by this, the maintenance of four sets of structures (SGML DTD, XML DTD, Flat Schema and Schema Master) must have been a nightmare.

I have had a very quick run through - not at all exhaustive - and a number of things are obviously changed. I have listed them briefly below:

Element Names

Gone are all the cryptic largely 8 character element names and in are a loads of others. Most seem to be reasonably obvious.

Those that are references of one sort or another all have the characters 'ref' at the end of the name. This does mean that REFDM has become dmref - but I guess that we can all live with that!

subpara1 to n and para0

These have gone. We now have a recursive element called levelledpara. I never have been one of those people who are stuck in a certain way and don't want to change. However, when I first encountered the S1000D specification, almost pre Issue 1 Change 6, I was used the idea of recursive 'level paragraph' type elements and did enquire why there were limitations on how many levels we could have.

The argument then was that it forced the writers of the information to think seriously about the structure of the data module and how it was going to appear to the end user. At the time I thought that it was a good argument and to be honest I still do.

I have seen some pretty horrific data modules in my time and do not have much confidence that someone will take advantage of this new structure and have 10 or more levels. I guess that those who are writing this type of structure in their documents have never been at the receiving end of 'handbooks' of this type.

The whole concept of a Data Module is that it should be small and not of novel length. What I think that this change will encourage is the writing of ridiculously large Data Modules without any thought to breaking the information down further. I suppose we have to ask the question: Why was this change necessary? Is it, as I have heard, because the Air Craft Manufacturers want to pour a complete CMM into a Data Module? If this is the case then they are flying (sorry about that!) in the face of S1000D and ignoring the fact that a CMM contains data of a fairly wide variety of types of information - each with its own ICN.

I guess that this is something that is going to have to be tackled by the Business Rules.

step1 to step n

I see that the same has happened here as for the subpara elements from Issue 3 and before.

keepwithnext

I have stumbled on this attribute. Goodness me what on earth is this doing here? This is formatting, and, as is often declared as part of SGML and XML, quote "the data generator is divorced from formatting allowing him or her to dedicate themselves to writing accurate, concise, unambiguous text (which conforms to Simplified English if required)" endquote. I can see many an otherwise productive hour being wasted here by some authors trying to make the data look 'nice' on the screen. I guess some do not realise that as soon as it appears on someone else's screen or page the formatting probably goes out of the window.

Surely in an IETP this is totally irrelevant. And in a hard copy book this would be part of the styles which are attributed to the element. I first spotted this in the proceduralStep element.

Again, the Business Rules will be king here.

level attribute

I notice that in the attributes associated with the management of change that the level attribute has been removed. I know that this is going to create some difficulties within some companies who need it to indicate to the end user what has changed between issues of the publication (IETP or Hardcopy) where the Data Module has been subjected to several different issues between publications. This is particularly relevant and important where a Data Module originator is supplying essentially the same Data Module to several different clients. The original mechanism is so simple that if it is used properly issue tracking is guaranteed in a properly constructed delivery application.

Other things

I have no doubt that there will be a number of other significant changes come to light in the course of time as I, and others, start using Issue 4.

Something from Issue 3

While using Issue 3 the other day to write some testing procedures I discovered that their was a subtle change in the way that S1000D handled Sheets in the display of Figures. It seems that the XML prevents you from having something as simple as Sheet 1 of 2. The schema forces you to have two digits in both the sheet and sheetno attributes. I mentioned this a couple of days ago when I visited one of our clients and they were not too happy with the way it looks. Oh well we are stuck with Sheet 01 of 02 I suppose!

Budapest

I have recently received three emails letting me know that you can save money by booking now for the Budapest shared conference (ATA and S1000D). The link that was provided is http://www.ataebiz.org/forum

I will not be attending but I know that at least one person from my company will be there.

S1000D Bike Pack PDF on the ASD Web Site

2008-06-17T15:23:00.002Z

Some of you may have noticed that a short while ago a PDF file of the Bike Pack was made available on the S1000D.org web site. In fairness I needed to bring this to your attention since it represents perhaps the 'official' way of producing a 'book' from the Bike Pack Data Modules.

In looking through this PDF file you will find that it generally conforms to the 'one data module is one chapter' principle (as shown in the specification itself) although they do are not called chapters in this case.

Personally I find that this method of generating a 'book' from the Bike Pack does not do the material justice in that it does not contain the various linked material in a single series of identifiable pages. Of course the PDF has probably been produced using a Publication Module as the basis which gives you a much close approximation of the IETP principle.

What do you think?

I ask this question because if we are aiming at paper output I feel that it should be much closer to the concept of the traditional handbook. In an IETP you can obviously jump from one location to another and the 'story' will still hang together.

Where you have a procedure in a book it is generally preferable for the end user not to have to jump around even if it does mean duplicated material. In S1000D the duplicated material is likely to come from a single data module so from a publication maintenance point of view it is not really an issue.

So what do you think?

The Mekon Book

Something that I probably omitted to highlight properly within the introduction section in the PDF file which came out of the Mekon BookBuild application is the question of the copyright of the material.

On the front page there is a sample copyright statement (it says so) but immediately following that is a statement that the content of the book is "taken from the S1000D Bike Pack version 2.3 as supplied by ASD and the content copyright resides with them."

This whole question of copyright where the material has been made publicly available for demonstration purposes probably needs clarification.

X-Pubs and S1000D

2008-06-17T15:14:00.002Z

Some of you may remember that the X-Pubs event last year in Reading had quite a number of items of interest to the S1000D fraternity. I have just had a flyer from them which indicates that there is going to be possibly even more S1000D content.

This years event is going to take place later this month at the London Heathrow Marriott Hotel and it has a number of presentations in the S1000D arena. A number of the presenters are well known to us not only in the S1000D area but also in the allied area of Training.

Presenters include:

Dennis Raitz,Associate Technical Fellow at Boeing, share 16 years of lessons learned in IETP development and implementation
Chris Wood, BAE delivers a User reality-check to make sure the advancement of modular standards doesn’t advance without attention to the needs of real field maintenance staff development and implementation
Wayne Gafford, covering big changes in the future of ADL SCORM management development and implementation
Richard Nicolson, PTC Product Manager for S1000D delivery applications, educate on how the reuse opportunity can be maximised with modular content, development and implementation
Maria Luisa MacDonald, STE Tutor and the STE National Coordinator, AgustaWestland demonstrates how STE can help the customer experience.

From what I have heard there are also going to be a fair number of delegates from the Aerospace industry and this means plenty of opportunity to 'network' and share experiences. These experiences are very valuable and often serve as a much more serious reason for attending.

The dates next week - 22nd to 24th June.

I am going to be there on the first day, Monday - perhaps I will see you there

Follow this link to take you to the X-Pubs web site.

Retirement Looms - but not being put out to grass

2008-03-07T14:41:00.006Z

Some of you may know that I am getting towards that time of life when the State says that I should retire. Tomorrow I will be reaching that age when the UK Government starts to pay me back all that money (I wish) that I have contributed to the 'Greater Good' during my working life.

What does this mean for me?

Well after a break of about a month during which I have some fairly essential jobs to do here at Davison Manor, Easter, and a trip to the wildest areas of Britain (Scotland actually) I shall no longer be working full time for Mekon. I am not deserting them completely since we have agreed that I will continue in a part time role within the Aerospace and Defence Department (can't get rid of me that easily!).

What this does mean is that I will also be able to spend more time developing interests which have had to take back stage until now. Some of these include getting my radio gear back on the air and spending more time with this S1000D Blog (which has been a bit neglected of late due to pressures of work).

What I definitely don't want to do yet is to give up my interest in S1000D and my aim to help those working in this area to develop their skills. It is important that S1000D is understood, because when it is most companies will have increasing confidence in their ability to deliver high quality material to their clients. Those who contact me on a regular, or even irregular basis, can be assured that I will still respond to their requests and calls for help.

In addition to my email address at Mekon, I can also be contacted using this link

S1000D Sample BikePack Publication Available

2008-02-27T16:36:00.002Z

Late last year I indicated that the Company that I work for has an application for taking S1000D Data modules and producing a hard copy publication, or a PDF version of one. At that time I thought that I could quickly have something available for public view, using the S1000D Bike Pack example files as the source.

Little did I know that the Company's web site was in the throws of being redesigned which meant that I could not get any resources to provide me with the means to make it available. I have now overcome that by various means.

What is it that is being made available?

What we have done is to take the Bike Pack provided as examples at Issue 2 Change 3 (don't groan too loudly, it is the only S1000D material that we can publicly use) and put it through the Mekon Eclipse BookBuild application to produce a PDF file of the publication. There are obviously several different ways of putting the Bike Pack together to get a "proper" story and which route is taken depends on the individual doing the building and also the end requirement.

Suffice it to say that I have only produced one book (in both SGML and XML) just to give an idea of what can be achieved.

The application has the ability to convert all the cross referencing, both standard xref and refdm, into hypertext links. They are fully resolved. The refdm entry is converted into text which indicates the Section/Volume (if these are being used), Chapter and Para/Step if appropriate. The mechanism which allows the refdm to point to a target in the destination DM is also enabled.

I hope that these files will help to give and example of "look and feel" which can be achieved. Please let me know what you think.

By resolving all of the cross referencing elements some have likened the result of the BookBuild Process to a simple IETP. Currently we are not resolving links to hotspots on CGM graphics but of course we are looking to correct this deficiency.

How do I get it the example files?

To get these files you will need to visit the Mekon site, specifically the part which is associated with the Aerospace and Defence section. You can then look at details about Software that we produce.

Failing that you can directly to the Eclipse BookBuild Web page by following this link.

At the moment these files are only for the S1000D Issue 2.3 Bike Pack. I am already working on samples for the S1000D Issue 3 set.

Mekon's MD Tries to Drum up Business

2007-10-01T09:27:00.000Z

Some of you may know that Mekon's MD Julian Murfitt is a bit of a flying aficionado. Not only does he run a company that produces software used by many to create documentation to both S1000D and ATA iSpec 2200 specification but he also flies aerobatics. Of course his aerobatics are not quite the same as the UK's Red Arrows team (although he has flown a Hawk aircraft) but in its own way it is just as demanding.

As you can see from this photo the engine is in the wrong place and it has a nasty whirly bit at the front which he claims is enough to pull him through the air and enable him to pull up to 10g turns - quite a bit tighter than the Hawk can do.

Recently he took part in the 5th Advanced European Aerobatics Championships in Joensuu, Finland. Having been entered into a number of the classes the first hurdle was to get there from the UK. Naturally he flew the whole way. Considering the competition he gave a very creditable performance achieving 10th Place in the Free Program and ninth in the First Unknown Compulsory Program.

More recently he has achieved the dizzy heights (or should it be ups and downs?) of British Advanced Aerobatic Champion 2007 and congratulations are obviously due on this result.

You may be able to see from the view in the cockpit to the right that Julian does not use his own software for producing his flight plans in accordance with either of the specifications.

For those who would like to know a bit more about Julian's Hobby and are planning to visit the upcoming event in Oslo there will be an opportunity to do so there. I am sure that he will be very happy to chat with you about it.

Catching Up on S1000D Business

2007-09-03T09:48:00.000Z

Having been declared 'Hors de combat' by the Medical Profession for the last few weeks it is time for me to catch up on what has been happening on the S1000D front.

Having had a look around in the last couple of days there seems to be several things happening worthy of note:

This list is obviously not exhaustive and as this is a catch up post I will limit the content and perhaps look at each in more detail shortly in other posts.

Adobe Road Show with FrameMaker 8

I know that there are a number of people involved in producing documentation to S1000D who use Adobe FrameMaker, and have done so very happily for years using products which are extremely stable. For those of you who are in the UK you may be interested to know that Adobe have arranged a series ofRoad Shows (follow this link) to introduce Adobe FrameMaker 8.

In addition to seeing the changes made to this product demonstrations are also going to be given covering two further products: Adobe Acrobat 8 3D, Adobe Captivate.

One of the major features of the new FrameMaker is its ability to handle 3D images and I have to say I was very impressed with the demonstration that I saw back in June (immediately prior to my discovering that my indigestion was actually something more serious). One feature of Adobe Acrobat 8 3D that impressed me was its ability to take CATIA files, manipulate them to the view that you want and then output them as CGM - awesome! I am sure that those of you coming recently to the S1000D authoring world would find investigating this ability to be financially rewarding particularly in contracts where the prime is issuing CATIA files as part of the source information.

There are three venues for this Road Show

London - September 5th
Coventry - September 6th
Manchester - September 7th

Each session is half a day and Registration is free (follow this link for the registration form where you can indicate your preference for day and time). I now that there are spaces so why not go for it.

For those interested, there is also a Frame 8 upgrade training course avaialble. This course will be available for a limited time during the period of switching between 7.2 and 8.

ASD S1000D Issue 3 is Published

Hot on the heels of Issue 2.3 v 10 we have seen the publication of S1000D Issue 3. As usual the specification together with DTDs, examples etc are available from the S1000D web site which some will note has had a face lift.

Obviously some of the changes which may be noticed here sit on top of the Issue 2.3 Specification. Of interest to some, perhaps, are the changes to visual formatting. Earlier issues of 2.n have had several of the structures example chapters included as TBA. Well in 2.3 they have been and it begs the question of why some of the changes were made. No doubt it might become clear eventually but certainly one I was looking at (Procedural) has an alternative layout where the various steps are not indented. On the face of it this is a retrograde step since it is now not so easy to see the hierarchy of the data.

More about Issue 3 etc. in another Blog posting.

S1000D Oslo event

I notice that the programme for the European Technical Data Event which takes place in Oslo from 1st to 4th October this year and at which there is a fair amount of S1000D content is firming up nicely. For those of you who either have not heard of this event or would like to catch up you can get access to the information via the CTS Events organisation. You will need to register and sign on but this is free.

Following the links to the CTS Events enables you to get access to the programme and  you can also register on-line.

The programme includes Training sessions on S1000D as well as SCORM and PLCS. The presentation programme appears to cover most of the areas of using the Specification. In addition there are presentations on the integration with other Specifications/Standards which some of you may well have to get to grips with.

Of course, in addition to the presentations, one of the main features of the CTS events is the socialising/interaction/catching up between delegates. There is going to be a good representation of trade stands.

I will not be there this year but I am going to try and get one or two people to feed me with their impressions during the event. f you are interested in a guest blogger spot, please let me know.

X-Pubs 2007 - Update on Aerospace and Defence interest sessions

2007-05-21T16:50:00.000Z

This is a short Blog item to remind you that it is only a couple of weeks to the X-Pubs 2007 XML Conference where there are several items of interest to those involved in Technical Publications work, particularly in S1000D.

The latest version of the two-day programme is contained in a PDF file which can be downloaded byfollowing this link. The conference is divided into three tracks

Business
Technical
Sponsor

In the technical track there are 5 presentations targeted at the Aerospace and Defence interest groups with 4 of these specifically related to S1000D. In addition to this Track there are other presentations of interest to the S1000D related industry including a case study by Corena and by XyEnterprise (mentioned in my last Blog).

I know that the guys organising the Conference are still working hard at filling a couple of holes and with the growing interest in S1000D I have no doubt that they have this subject in mind.

Perhaps I will be able to meet some of you during the Conference - please make yourselves known to me.

X-Pubs news - More S1000D Related Presentations

2007-04-27T16:24:00.000Z

Following on from my last Blog item about the up-coming XML Conference X-Pubs in Reading (June 4th to 5th 2007) a couple of further developments which affect the S1000D community. Two new presenters have been announced

Harvey Greenberg of XyEnterprise
Wayne Gafford from ADL SCORM

With the DITA discussion groups still covering 'Should we - Should we not' do something detailed about mapping it to S1000D, the X-pubs conference promises to be a good place to get up to date quickly about the current thinking.

To help a little in your decisions about whether to attend this conference, I have put a bit more detail here about the two presentations highlighted in this Blog. Of course you can find out all the information about Presenters and how to Register from the Website.

Harvey Greenberg - XyEnterprise

Harvey is going to review two different case studies that have similar approaches to problem solving even though they come from greatly different industry settings. The contention is that by using a sound analytical foundation, XML and content management can work together to make very hard problems easy.

Evolving standards such as S1000D and DITA and technologies such as InfoPath are further reducing cost and time to implementation and making XML approachable for people throughout the enterprise.

Wayne Gafford from ADL SCORM

ADL, as we know, have signed a memorandum of agreement with ASD so that they can cooperate in the driving closer links and interoperability between the two specifications.

Being of a practical nature, what will be of particular interest is thatthis presentation is going to demonstrate how learning content structured in the S1000D international technical data spec is a benefit to the DoD training community. The presentation will also demonstrate how technical data structured in S1000D can be imported directly into courseware and made SCORM-conformant.

S1000D @ Oslo

2007-04-27T15:05:00.000Z

We hear that the European Tech Data event being held in Oslo from 1^st to 4^thOctober this year and is open for bookings -ended by both S1000D TPSMG and EPWG meetings. There will also be a PLCS meeting and discussions are underway about holding a SCORM day after the Conference – watch this space for details.

The theme of the conference is the Need to create interoperability / integration in the Specification world. At this conference, S1000D, ADL SCORM, and PLCS are under the microscope, with lead speakers from all three specifications and representation from Government and Industry.

So often those involved in a particular Specifications tend to be 'blinkered' about developments in other areas so it is refreshing to see this degree of co-operation.

This is a critical time for all of the Specifications as governments review the cost of change and the benefits of integrated processes. What is achieved in Oslo could well shape the future.

Updated Programme and other Details

If you visit the CTS Website you will also be able to see up to date details regarding the programme. I know that there are some slots without names on but the bulk of those presenting are well known and I am sure that we will all be very interested in their thoughts and experience.

Networking - Valuable use of Time

Technical Publications tends to be a very isolated world and one of the main reasons for attending conferences such as this is the ability to network and swap experiences. I have noticed in my trips to the States over the last 15 years or so is that they are very much more switched on to the concept of networking.

In the UK we tend to be a bit isolationist. There is the general feeling that Technical Publications is part of a demonstrably 'Cinderella' area of industry where there is a huge reluctance to spend money (even when there is a huge advantage in doing so). No wonder there are problems rolling out knowledge. Evidence of repeated mistakes is not difficult to find.

This reluctance to allow Publications People to attend conferences is not recent as I know from my time on the organising committee for the Tech Doc series of seminars in the UK 'last century'. Even then money was always very tight.

Lets hope that, with more S1000D projects coming on board, the networking aspect of conferences is better recognised.

S1000D Issue 2 Change 3 now available

2007-04-25T08:30:00.000Z

After a slight hiccough S1000D Issue 2 Change 3 is now available at the downloads page on the S1000D.org website. For a short while version 9 of the Specification was available but now v10 is there. This is contained in a zip file "s1000d_Iss_2-3_r1.zip". I suppose that some time we will find out why the stutter - but does it really matter?

The S1000D Specification is even bigger than before running to a total of 2588 pages and contains several new structures. For those who want a quick view of what has changed there is a separate file available helpfully called DMC-AE-A-00-00-0000-00A-003A-A_004-00.pdf on the web site.

New Structures

There are four new structures available:

Technical Repository
Container
Product cross-reference table
Technical conditions cross-reference table

I have no doubt that we will hear more about these in the future. There have been rumours of some of these over the past 12 months or so with a variety of comments, some derogatory and others almost ecstatic.

As to other changes, well they are quite numerous with some of them being more of a clarification rather than a new 'feature'.

Sample Data

Included in this release is part of an updated Bike Pack. I have not had chance to have a look at these yet. According to the Web Site only four data types have been provided:

Descriptive
Procedural
Publication Module
BREX

I know from my position of someone who supports S1000D and who also has to demonstrate S1000D compliant applications to prospective clients the usual groan runs along the lines of "can you show us something useful - not the Bike Pack". Of course the problem here is that most of the material that we have belongs to our clients and for confidentiality reasons we cannot use customer provided DMs can we?

I am sure that we all look forward to getting the next bunch of DMs so that we can build up some sort of test suite.

Have you had a chance to look at the new version? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

S1000D and this years X-Pubs Event - More Detail

2007-03-26T14:56:00.000Z

Following on from my last post about the X-Pubs event I notice from recently updated X-Pubs Website that they have firmed up on the S1000D and related Content. Their programme is now published atthis place.

S1000D Specific Content

Specifically of interest to S1000D users is the announcement that Svante Ericsson is to give a paper on "The S1000D X-Road" (follow
this link for the Paper Outline). He is going to give an overview of what S1000D has been doing to the present date together with the reasons for going down the XML route.

For some the paper provides a practical viewpoint with particular focus on four questions:

Has data quality increased?
Will the data modules be more available?
Will presentation of information be better?
Has the maintainability of the Specification increased?

For those of us involved in the industries which use S1000D these questions are very important, particularly the first three.

Svante is, of course, a member of the Electronic Publications Working Group, the body of people who are charged with all the technical maintenance and development work associated with the ASD S1000D Specification. It will be good to hear straight from the source rather than by whispers third or fourth hand.

S1000D and this years X-Pubs Event

2007-03-23T16:40:00.000Z

Last year I pointed readers to the X-Pubs event in the UK. By all accounts this was very well attended by delegates from over 50 different companies. The delegates reported back very favourably with the breadth and quality of the presentations.

This year sees the return of this event which is being held on 4th & 5th June near Reading in the UK and with a title of "How did they do it?", together with the speakers already booked, this promises to be an event not to be missed if you can be in the area at the right time. Although the main thrust is obviously XML based with S1000D Issue 2.2 being fully XML compliant these areas

Topics and Tracks

Topics to be covered in this event include Content Management Systems, Publishing Standards and Change Management - all of importance to the S1000D Community.

There are two tracks through the event, one deals primarliy with business and technical issues with the other focusing on the commercial aspects which is probably of more interest to vendors of software and services.

Some of you may be aware of an ongoing discussion regarding DITA and S1000D. Well no conference to do with the dissemination of information would be complete without these two interesting specifications being covered somewhere. X-Pubs is no exception.

More often than some would like to agree there is an increasing requirement for Paper output from S1000D and I am sure that with the XML processes will provide some with a route to hard-copy deliverables. In addition standard XML processes can be used to provide straightforward IETP deliverables (provided the rules are followed in the generation of the SGML/XML Data Modules).

Further Information

Further information can be obtained by visiting the X-Pubs Website. An early visit to the site is recommended because the number which can attend are limited and, apparently, the take-up so far has been brisk.

S1000D and Oslo in October

2007-03-19T11:58:00.000Z

The hinted at S1000D event is going to take place in Oslo, Norway, between
1st and 4th October 2007.

With the signing of the memoranda of agreements between various bodies the Title of the conference is:

PLCS - S1000D - ADL SCORM
Three Specifications One Future?

The draft programme and conference booking facilities can be accessed via the CTS Events website where you will need to log in (or register if you have not done so before) to get access to these items.

The event recognises that there is quite a difference between having an agreement and getting different areas to work together. Interoperability is very important because unless this is achieved and well documented each person or organisation is going to have to start from scratch with all the angst that that entails.

How many of you, I wonder, can say "Been there, Done that, Got the Tee-shirt". I know I have and would have readily listened to the experiences of one of the "Pioneers".

Programme

As is usual with these events there are Training Sessions for PLCS, S1000D and SCORM available on the first day. There are two SCORM sessions but the later one is a repeat.

In looking over the programme the papers are fairly evenly divided amongst the three Specifications/Standards with an emphasis on 'How to Do It' in a number of them. These type of papers, if honesty prevails, are very important, after all we all have to learn and unless you have done it it is often difficult to determine exactly where to begin.

PLCS is the all encompassing Logistics Specification (I once heard it described as the Jumbo Def Stan 00-60) and for those of you who want to know a bit more about it the PLCS Inc FAQ pages are worth looking at. In the future it is going to be very important to have the process for extraction of S1000D information from a Logistics application, particularly on large projects, well documented and established. In view of its importance it is good to note that there is a paper on the integration of S1000D and PLCS.

Of course the link between the training aspects of S1000D and SCORM is relatively well known at a high level and I understand that there is ongoing work here to ensure that the two specifications allow information to pass between them. Just in case there are some who would like to find out more about SCORM visit the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) website

Ongoing S1000D Work

The programme also has slots for "Practical Issues in Spec
Integration" on the Practical Issues Day (Final Day - Day 3 of the conference proper). I hope that the speakers will be able to bring their experiences to the conference and share it with us.

Part of the ongoing S1000D work are the areas of Implementation and Business Rules. These are important areas of work because if S1000D has a major weakness it is the lack of information about How to do it and What needs to be defined at the beginning so that all the various projects at least stand a chance of sharing data.

And of course we await the next issue/Change to S1000D to see what has changed. Of course what follows on from that is how do we implement it? That's for another day!

S1000D Users - relatively new Google Group

2007-01-04T11:14:00.000Z

This is a very short Blog to bring to your attention a discovery that I am sure has the potential to help all those who are new to S1000D or who have a knotty problem.

The other day I had an email from someone who reads this blog asking if I knew of an email list, bulletin board or whatever to do with S1000D. I must admit that this was something that had crossed my mind and was on a 'to-do' list. So this contact acted as a trigger for me to do some research.

The result of this research is that I have
found such a group for S1000D users (linked from here) which seems to have been started in November of last year. So far there have been three threads.

Full marks to "shiftsp" whoever he (or she) is.

Clearly we will have to wait and see how well membership to this group is taken up. Some other groups that I have been involved in have been very vibrant with quick and good quality responses and where touchy exchanges are at a minimum. Others have very little traffic and yet others full of grumpy old men.

I hope that this one fulfils the potential that it deserves for the S1000D community.

Please join in - your input will be appreciated I am sure.

Industry Drives Toward Digital, Standardized Data

2007-01-02T15:03:00.000Z

An article with the above title has been written by Henry Canaday and recently published in Aviation Week in which the migration from Paper based delivery to digital delivery of aviation publications is discussed. What is very interesting here is that the views of several large companies involved in aviation have been obtained and are reported.

Of course ATA iSpec 2200 is mentioned as one would expect but the S1000D Specification is also included.

Early in the article Ray Marzulo from Boeing is quoted as saying that iSpec 2200 is being used for engineering and maintenance data. He does not actually say what S1000D is being used for. However he is reported as stressing that "Standards are the glue necessary to avoid one-off solutions".

Common Standards

An interesting comment comes early on in the article where Canaday indicates that "there has been some resistance to common standards". This resistance is apparently coming from companies that would like their own current definitions to industry standards.

I guess that we have all seen companies coming up with their 'marvelous solutions' which will answer all their requirements. Very soon after the production of the solution it is discovered that there are drawbacks to "ploughing their own furrow" when it comes to publications. Information supplying companies can become a bit militant if they have to provide material to a special formulation for just one client.

One thing that does concern me, and I think that this affects not only iSpec2200 but potentially S1000D, is that some companies are specifying the use of certain structure options which are specifically frowned upon in the parent specifications. This obviously relates to Canaday's comment above about resistance.

Migration from iSpec2200 to S1000D

Clearly, as indicated in another posting on this Blog, it is going to be some years, if ever, that the main Aircraft Manufacturers will switch from iSpec2200 to S1000D. With the legacy situation being what it is, and the length of time that some aircraft remain in service, it will not make commercial sense to convert from one to the other for all but some new (very new?) aircraft types.

The way output is going

Included in the article is a couple of paragraphs about Rolls Royce. They have been moving from paper output to PDF files in the first instance. The sort of numbers quoted vary from 520 different publications for 12 engines to 3000 customer locations world wide. Their main thrust in moving to PDF files has resulted in more than 800 customers using their Aeromanager system which is their on-line system. This is very impressive from the odd bits that I have had demonstrated to me. In time no doubt the underlying standard used for authoring will move gradually to S1000D, after all there are large areas of Rolls Royce which are heavily involved in this specification.

At the heart of all systems to be used on long term projects has got to be that of Applicability. The commercial Aerospace industry is well versed in this area. In the early 90s I was involved in the design and creation of a system that could produce a customised Handbook for an aircraft which would then be delivered to a particular Airline. In this system all sgml files contained all the necessary information for a particular part/system and this was 'cut down' in accordance with the configuration database content. I have a feeling that configuration control is very good in the civil aerospace industry but severely lacking in the rest of industry, including the services.

Consistent not Perfect

And finally, one phrase jumped out of the article at me. Towards the end of the Article Northwest Airline's Tim Larson, who is also head of the ATA's e-Business steering group, is quoted as indicating that there are large gains to be made in having a common document delivery method for all aircraft. This is going to ensure that there is a good reuse of information in areas such as Work Cards. He urges manufacturers to be consistent, not perfect in developing the new standards. Clearly this is also where Business Rules are going to have some influence - consistency is king - without it very little data can be shared between projects.

However, he seems to have made a statement which rings slight alarm bells with me. "S1000D has not yet been used for commercial aircraft". This is not quite what I have been led to understand. He then goes on (more bells?)...
"There are still some mismatches between S1000D and ATA standards. And S1000D is still a moving target as version 3.0 replaces 2.3."

Well! We do know that S1000D 2.3 has not yet hit the streets and whilst it may be a moving target, the majority of the S1000D specification remains essentially well established. But what about the 'mismatches' issue raised by Larson. In a slightly simplistic approach from 30+ years in publications there are bound to be mismatches, they are different specifications generated for different reasons.

To be honest, compared with S1000D, generating content using the ATA iSpec2200 specification is far from straightforward for the author where I have found all sorts of 'fudges' are required to give the necessary look and feel required by the specification. Of course there are generations of authors who have grown up on the ATA specifications and so they are used to them but the structures are far more straightforward in S1000D. What is perhaps not quite straight forward are the underlying structures which surround S1000D, not forgetting of course that this specification was initially intended for electronic delivery only and not for paper/PDF output.

And Finally Finally

In spite of my comments above I found this article to be very informative.

If anyone has read a recent article that they think is likely to be of interest to the S1000D world please let me know, or even better, write something about how it strikes you.

Seasons Greetings

2006-12-22T10:01:00.000Z

Just a very quick Blog entry to wish those of you who celebrate this time of year Seasons Greetings. I hope that your New Year will be:

enjoyable (we should all aim to enjoy our work)
prosperous (and we should be paid for it if possible)
interactive (no good just beavering away in isolation - it does us all good to talk with others about items of common interest)

It is a tradition that we make New Year resolutions (yes I know that we really try to keep them) but in recent years my track record has not been good in this respect. However one thing that I am going to do is to populate this Blog more often. With other work this is often not so easy to achieve.

There is a fair amount of work going on in the S1000D environment what with the publication of Issue 2.3, work on the Business Rules and Implementation Guide. I also know that there are applications targetted at S1000D which are close to release from several companies. So I hope that I can cover these as they happen. (If your company has an application which is targeted at S1000D or can be adapted to S1000D then why not let me know via the email address and I can cover it in a factual sort of way).

I know that the Directors and Staff at Mekon send their best wishes to all of our customers and clients, both S1000D and Non-S1000D related.

See you all in the 2007

S1000D and DITA

2006-12-22T09:48:00.000Z

Some of you may be interested to hear that the OASIS organisation is hosting a group to discuss whether or not there should be a group to discuss the viability of a technical committee to look into running a project. The object of this project, if there is enough support, is to work towards mapping S1000D structures across into DITA. (DITA is an OASIS XML Markup based standard.)

The purpose of this is to attempt get a completely interoperable system for the bi-directional movement of data. In looking at some of the previous attempts, in 2004 I think this started as an idea and seemed to get nowhere. However, with a much bigger base of DITA users, and certainly far more people using S1000D there may now be enough momentum and interest to work on this.

Which Spec should we use?

You may remember that in an earlier posting I indicated how we at Mekon had come up with a relatively simple rule of thumb as to which Spec should be used.

If the subject of the publication is purchased by a part number and spares are also purchased by a part number then most likely S1000D is for you.
If the subject is a design, or perhaps a software project for example then probably DITA is for you.

As a crude start this seems to work quite well.

The advantages of interoperability

Without a doubt the ability to migrate information from one specification to the other should provide very advantageous.

I can foresee several likely scenarios where a project using S1000D could use material produced using DITA. Providing a well structured migration route would make 'borrowing' material from another source a much better and safer prospect. Because the route is going to be well known there may well be simple tools
available to ease the pain even further.

Of course the reverse is also true, probably more so because, of course, in S1000D we have a need to identify each chunk of information with the Data Module Code and this does not occur in DITA.

It will be very interesting to see if the group gets started to produce the interoperability/mapping information in a formal way.

Dublin Core

There is an area of common ground in both Specifications in that the The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (Dublin Core) forms an integral part of the structures. You can find out more the principles etc of Dublin Core this from this site.

The S1000D has the Dublin Core elements within the IDSTATUS area. Just how much use is being made of this metadata provision is unclear, but when there is a need to intelligently extract information from vast quantities of data then this has to be a good start.

Starter Packs

The two methods of working also have something else in common. Adobe have released starter packs for FrameMaker for both S1000D and DITA. Whilst I have looked at the S1000D starter pack I have not has exposure as yet to the DITA starter pack. I will try and get one of Mekon's DITA people to do a brief bit for the Blog.

What I do know is that Mekon is in the final stages of producing a DITA-S1000D White paper. I will let you know when this is available and how to get it.

Addendum - Dead Link in DCL Survey Posting

2006-11-01T14:40:00.000Z

This post is just to let you know that the previous Blog about the DCL Survey had a dead link in it. I have just republished it with the link now repaired and live.

Many thanks to the person who let me know about this broken link.

DCL Survey Feedback

2006-10-20T13:54:00.000Z

I have just received notification of the feedback from a survey carried out by Data Conversion Labs (DCL) that I took part in not too long ago. Apparently they had over 200 participants which I suppose was not too bad considering the fairly small number of people that know about this company in the US.

Results Outline related to S1000D

Why am I mentioning this you may be asking. Well, bearing in mind the survey was about documentation, one of the questions was "How familiar are you with the following terms:" and this included S1000D. The responses were, I thought, interesting.

Very familiar with the term - 23%
Heard of it but unsure what it is - 22%
Unfamiliar with the term - 55%

I will leave you to look at the results of the other terms yourselves by looking at the survey. But given that the other terms included Content Reuse and Single Source Publishing, both concepts high on the S1000D priority list there is clearly a large amount of education still to be done. Of course, S1000D is particularly designed for Technical Documentation associated with Hardware and Software so this may well prove to be the reason.

Who Took Part

According to the survey the respondents by and large came from Hardware/Equipment manufacturers and Services (which I assume means the armed forces - or does it?).

Country

One of the questions related to "Where are you located?" but unfortunately the results gave just two categories; US and Other Country. It might be interesting to see where else the respondents were located.

Another Survey in 12 Months?

It would be very interesting to see the results of a similar survey carried out in 12 months time. Would there, I wonder, be a significantly different set of figures for S1000D?

General Catch up

2006-10-06T13:34:00.000Z

There have been one or two developments associated with S1000D during the last couple of months. Some watchers of this Blog may not be aware of these so I thought that it would be a good idea to highlight some of them.

New/Amended Schemas for S1000D Issue 2 Change 2

Some updated/amended schemas for S1000D Issue 2 Change 2.1, designated Issue 2.2.1, are available on the website (follow this link to get directly to the download page). I hear that these changes were necessary after some problems were discovered by developers incorporating the original schemas into their applications.

I understand that 2.2.1 has rectified just about all the issues. The S1000D SGML DTD has not been affected by this update.

S1000D Issue 2.3 Delayed

The schema update from 2.2 to 2.2.1 was made all the more important following the announcement on 2nd October that the Issue Date of S1000D 2.3 (follow this link to get directly to the announcement page) has been put back from 2 October 2006 to 28 February 2007. To be honest I am not surprised because S1000D Issue 2.3 will be the first edition to have been produced from XML files (prior to this not even SGML was used). The company that I work for has an application that prints Data Modules hard copy/PDF publications in a way that produces documents looking and feeling very close to historical handbooks and with the PDF files having full hypertext linking between cross-references and REFDMs. I can vouch for the amount of development work required to handle this type of output with the level of options that we have. The other factor which I can vouch for is that generating PDF output which equates to several hundreds, even a thousand or so pages, is no click-and-view process - it can and does take several hours.

Keep up the good work people.

Preliminary Details about the S1000D Forum in 2007

Recently added to the Meetings and Events page on theS1000D Website is preliminary information about the 2007 S1000D Forum which is scheduled to take place inMelbourne, Australia 1 - 3 May 2007. It has a working title of Transition from Paper to Interactive. A PDF file can be downloaded which gives some essential but preliminary information about the event.

Course Notification: S1000D Training Course

2006-10-06T08:38:00.000Z

Are you looking to increase your knowledge of S1000D and how to implement the standard in your organisation?
I’ll be running an s1000D training course at Mekon's training facility on the 20th -22nd of November, in the UK.
This is a generic course for those who wish to gain knowledge of the S1000D specification, how to implement it and its implications for technical publications.
Both Management, who are intending to implement the principles of S1000D, and Project Mangers and Authors, who will generate data in accordance with S1000D, will find the course interesting and applicable.
The course is spread over one or three days, depending on the level of knowledge you need.

Day One - an introduction to the requirements for implementing S1000D. Managers and those who need only to be aware of the requirements may use this as a stand-alone day.
Days Two/Three - A detailed look at S1000D covering the hierarchical breakdown of equipment and SGML/XML structure behind the standard. This part of the course is intended for those who are going to generate material in accordance with S1000D.

I really enjoy giving these courses which I regard as a two-way event. We can all learn and benefit from others' experiences. Although this course is taking place in Sutton in the UK I have been to other places, both within the UK and other countries, to give this course or a specially modified version to suit local needs.

And in an unashamed plug (which I very rarely do):
You may have specialist requirements or a large group needing training and hence would benefit from a customised course which we can deliver on your site anywhere in the world.

For more information or to book at place please contact Susanne at Mekon. Please say you saw the course on my blog!

Twelve Months On

2006-08-21T13:52:00.000Z

It is now about 12 months since I started the S1000D Blog and there has been a lot happening in the S1000D arena. A lot of this is happening behind the scenes but I believe that there seems to be a shift to making more of the Specification Development more accessible to the greater public. Time, of course, will tell.

Has anyone read the S1000D Blog?

I think that the answer to that is YES!

I have just looked up the stats for the last 12 months and it makes quite good reading.

Unique users	3,201
Page views	7,7276
Average visits per day	13
Average visit length	2 minutes
Where from	19 countries and 12 different time zones across 5 continents.

From nothing 12 months ago to the above that is not bad at all. Of course I wish that there was more feedback but I suppose that this a little unlikely by the nature of the site. The feedback that we have had has been mainly constructive and informative and thank you to all who have contributed. I am of course open to suggestions about subject matter for posts, and would love to hear of any S1000D events or news that I may have missed.

The Poll

Of course, we introduced the Poll a short while ago and the outcome is, I suppose, predictable. 65% of respondents are currently using S1000D and 35% believe they will be using S1000D in the future.

Mind you this sort of response does not look quite so good when you realise that in total only 46 viewers have actually made their mark in the appropriate box.

The Future - More postings

I have one or two more topics to cover in the next few weeks but one of them, the Business Benefits of S1000D, requires a accompanying document. It is not really feasible to have this subject all on the Blog page.

I am also in the process of defining some more questions for the poll. These will be linked to the Business Benefits aspect of S1000D.

The future - Higher Profile

Higher Profile? Well yes, apparently Google seems think so. In an email exchange with one of our respondents a colleague discovered that the other person thought that Martyn was a nom de plume. For what it is worth It is me. I have lived with this name for a year or two.

Here's to another great 12 months.

Wrangling with the benefits of S1000D

2006-07-13T08:50:00.000Z

Just to alert you all to a great post about the benefits of S1000D I saw on another blog this morning. "S1000D: What is it? Who is using it? And why?" was posted by The Content Wrangler and aims to help demystify S1000D, discover who is using it, for what purposes, how it relates to DITA, and where you can learn more...

Problems with the S1000D Blog Page Formatting

2006-07-10T15:50:00.000Z

Some of you may have noticed that there are formatting problems with the S1000D Blog page. Suddenly the side bar will not stay put where it should and we have spent quite a long time trying to fix it to no avail.

We noticed that the problem started around the time that a Service Patch was made available from Microsoft so we have come to the conclusion that something was introduced which has changed the way IE6 behaves. This conclusion was reinforced when I looked at the page in Mozilla Firefox and could see that the formatting was fine. A little later I downloaded and tried IE7 Beta and this also displays the S1000D Blog page perfectly well.

I then decided to try some of the other browsers and all of them behaved perfectly. I have listed the browsers tried below.

Where to get the browsers

For completeness the list of browsers which display the S1000D Blog correctly are:

I have included links to the download sites in the above.

------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE

Thanks to Patterd for pointing out that Apple Safari also works problem free.

The need to be aware of emerging specifications

2006-06-23T10:03:00.000Z

During the S1000D Clearwater event mention was made of DITA and how it was modular and was used for documentation. By coincidence a fairly major DITA conference took place in the UK Recently (X-Pubs 2006). Readers may remember that I mentioned this back in April this year. By all accounts it was well attended and judging by the programme, which I pointed to last time, there must have been several very interesting presentations from the S1000D Standpoint.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend this even (yes I know it was only 200 miles or so away but other work made it impossible) but I want to make a comment on a couple of the presentations, one for upcoming interest to the S1000D providers and the other because it was about S1000D.

How to find the information in your Publication

The first item that I want to look at briefly is the presentation by Stephen Buxton of Mark Logic. His presentation was not actually about S1000D but it has some bearing on the Specification because of the obvious need for some method of searching complete system handbooks in a real and meaningful way.

Stephen has been involved with the Science (or is it Art) of searching data for sometime and he works for Mark Logic who are heavily involved in Content Management and the leverage that good control and searching gives over data access. I mention this because there is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation which covers the querying of XML based data. Called XQuery, I understand that some of the engines which are becoming available and which comply with earlier work by W3C (Stephen is on the committee) is indicating that searching XML data, even huge amounts of data can be a very rapid process.

Now I mention this because something that has been a source of concern for the end users of the S1000D IETP packages that are available has been the ease in which the data can be searched in a free way. Clearly this searching capability is not quite so important in a relatively small IETP but when we come to a system, say for example a ship such as an Aircraft Carrier, being able to find what you want is going to be a problem.

It clearly depends on how the information is put together. Back in 1990 I was demonstrating a keyboard less/mouse less navigation system (it used touch screen computers) which I implemented for a UK Electronic Handbook system. Access to data at all levels of the break down (yes the handbook was structured for different levels of equipment breakdown even then) enabled the user to get access to main information areas within seconds (there was not a table of contents using the graphical navigation method although one was available). But it did not have a search capability.

I will leave the searching for parts to another time perhaps, but with a good search engine based on XQuery this problem may well have been solved if the System documentation has been handled in a holistic way and not just piecemeal.

DITA and S1000D (or should it be S1000D and DITA)

Another presentation at the X-Pubs Technical Track was by Noz Urbina (yes he does work for Mekon) was entitled DITA v S1000D - A Comparison of Leading Modular Documentation Standards. This paper provided a very valuable comparison between S1000D and DITA and pointed out that there was good stuff in both tracks and to some extent, as I pointed out back in April, it was horses for courses.

I have seen the Presentation (and the notes associated with it) and Noz certainly gave a good account of the S1000D Specification. I hope that it has helped to make some DITA Experts think before making the assumption that DITA is the be all and end all of publication specifications.

Noz's presentation pointed out that the DITA community had got something to learn from the S1000D specification which is very well established and usable and maintained by an independent organisation.

I am trying to persuade him to write the presentation up as a White Paper so that it can be made available to a much wider audience.

Clearwater '06 S1000D event

2006-06-14T12:01:00.000Z

Clearwater '06, the S1000D User Forum & Performance Fest kicked off to a very good start with the largest number of attendees that the organisers have ever had. The programme promised to be very informative, but of course, a lot of the value of these sort of events is the personal contacts between fellow S1000D ers. There are some areas which may be controversial (we had one such item which an exploding projector brought to a temporary halt right on cue).

S1000D Tutorials

The first part of the programme was the S1000D tutorials. During these sessions the speakers gave good and, in some cases, quite in-depth information and overhearing discussions indicated that they have been well received. Unfortunately I was not able to be at all of them because of other commitments however I did make the Business Rules session by Mike Day of Rolls Royce in the UK.

His presentation was frank and sometimes amusing. Amusing because some of the content struck chords with the experiences of a large number of delegates.

S1000D Keynote Speech

The keynote speech was not given by the advertised person because they were not able to attend at the last minute. The person who took his place is involved in a senior position within the DoD training scenario.

He provided some history of the training scene and progressed onto the need for work with standards such as S1000D. The ADL organisation runs a test bed so that compliance wiith the ADL Scorm specification can be measured.

At the end of the presentation what really stuck in my mind was his insistence that the only way that material can be shared properly is by adherence to the various specifications. If the specifications are used properly the migration of data from one environment to another is well known and guaranteed. Failure to follow the standards risked loosing the ability to transfer date with integrity.

This last injunction, to follow the standard, was highlighted when some of us spotted some non-standard xml being shown on one of the slides in a later presentation. There was an ID attribute to an element which had been extended in a non standard way. What did not come to light was whether the supplier of some advice to the department involved in the exercise had made the change (that is what we suspected because of the context of the change and the actual name of the modified attribute). Whilst the change was perfectly ok from an XML point of view it was non standard from the S1000D point of view. And if there is one thing that does seem to be coming out from this conference it is that there is a certain amount of hacking going on to the S1000D to make some additional functionality work. Not a good situation.

Not in realtime

I was hoping to provide a running commentary on the Conference but unfortunately due to other committments this was not possible. Perhaps this was a good thing because it has allowed a more measured 'report' on some aspects of the content of the presentations.

I will be adding some more content about the conference over the next few days.

Clearwater '06 - S1000D Business Rules

2006-06-03T11:57:00.000Z

You will be getting 'fed up' with me talking about Business Rules but on the second day of Clearwater '06 the S1000D User Fest, a good part of the programme was about them.

The presentations and discussions indicated that there were several different views of what exactly the S1000D Business Rules should be. You should be aware that the S1000D people have, for the moment, combined the groups handling Business Rules and Implementation, not because they actually live together but more because the boundaries are not clear at present.

The Presentations

Several people gave presentations which were led off by one from John Lawless of the UK MoD Policy Organisation for Technical Documentation.

His message was crystal clear:

They are essential
They can take a long time to develop
Development of business rules in a multi-country collaborative environment can take even longer.

Not only were these points well made but his other very important point was that all Business Rules should take into account Legacy data. These projects could be in earlier versions of S1000D but also still in hard copy (should the pages be turned into electronic format). With the possibility of having S1000D projects containing different Issues of S1000D it is important that the output be capable of mixing these in a proper manner.

From a purely output point of view, five or so years ago I remember proving beyond any doubt to an MoD representative, that the mixing of DM issues was possible when I created an IETP using several different issues of DMs - they had been advised that it could not be done. I was interested that this point was mentioned in the presentation.

Vendors Presentations

There were several vendors giving presentations of their interpretation of S1000D Business Rules and how they could handle them. I feel that only one actually tackled the question and raised the questions of what are Business rules and mentioned and this covered things like

Missing issue of DM
Missing graphics
Are unverified DMs allowable in a transfer package
What happens when the business rules are tightened part the way through a project (e.g. do the existing DMs have to be re-checked)

Unfortunately there was one presentation which was purely a demonstration of the software and made no mention of the flavour of the session i.e. Business rules. It was pointed out to me that they presentations were marked as commercial but I did, and still do, feel that the vendor could have at least paid lip served to the topic.

The S1000D Business Rules Content

A number of the delegates that spoke indicated that they eagerly awaited the inclusion of Business Rules into S1000D and there was some dismay that it was going to take so long to achieve this.

As has already been indicated, version 2.3 of S1000D is not going to contain anything specifically about Business Rules. Of course business rules are alluded to throughout the spec. The current situation is reported as:

The group is visually scanning through the specification to identify all the places where a Business rule is indicated
These references are being built up to make up a list of cross references
The intention is to produce a checklist to help in the creation of the Business Rules i.e. what needs to be in (although it is clear there is going to be too much to allow simple tick box working)

How long does it take to create Business Rules for S1000D Projects?

Some questions came to the surface relating to how long it takes to create and finalise the business rules. A period of one to two years was quoted and this did not result in any objections from some delegates who had done some - so be warned - Business Rules generation is not a quick job and should include the idea that some parameters could be tightened during the life of the project.

Hopefully S1000D Issue 3 will contain what you are looking for a flow chart of the process in generating Business Rules and Implementation Information and further guidance.

S1000D Event: Clearwater Approaches

2006-05-24T15:43:00.000Z

With the S1000D Event at Clearwater less than a week away I have spotted that the
CTS Events website has made the S1000D Clearwater Delegate List available. There are over 300 attendees from a wide variety of companies and countries and with the programme as already mentioned it looks as if it is going to be a good forum for learning and discussion. I know that I will be looking forward to the various sessions.

How to fit it all in

I know that one of the problems that I shall have is the fitting in of all that I want to do during the four days There are so many people that I would like to talk with who are working with S1000D so that I can find out what their route forward is likely to be.

Clearly there are the Business Rules and Implementation aspects of S1000D which have not really be covered up to now (this is being put right in the coming 12 months or so). There are also the other issues such as PLCS integration (or should it be integration with PLCS?), and the Friday Morning session on Standards Integration should prove to be informative.

I hope that it all becomes clear when I get there.

The Voting Panel

After some finger-nail biting it looks as if the voting buttons are working It took some time before I saw the numbers rising so keep up the good work.

At the moment I do not know how long to leave each voting panel. I am hoping that this period will more or less dictate itself but all the questions will be S1000D related.

On here since the last posting

For those who are not of a nervous disposition I have put my mug shot (photograph for those not familiar with the term) on the profile page. I am sorry, but clicking the picture does not show a larger size one. I took this one myself using my webcam which sits on my desk for use with Skype, Webex, MS Messenger etc.

So, should you wish, you may be able to pick me out in the crowd at Clearwater. Please come across and make yourself known. I will be at the Mekon table for some of the time so I should be relatively easy to spot - some say once seen never forgotten - but that is up to you to make up your own mind!

A New Feature for the S1000D Blog

2006-05-11T09:26:00.000Z

This is a very short posting blog to introduce a new feature for the S1000D Blog.

Although I have encouraged our readers to provide feedback to the S1000D postings in the form of comments I do realise that the vast majority of you either do not have time to put finger to keyboard, or don't feel the urge to respond. I can understand that, however, I really do value your opinions because it is important that there is pool of knowledge available a for others to tap into.

The New S1000D Blog Feature

To help this feedback process I have introduced a new feature on the S1000D Blog page. You may have noticed that there is a 'Poll Box' available.

It is our intention to change this Poll question from time to time so that we can build up a simple knowledge base of your opinions. The particular Poll feature that I have used gives you an immediate feedback on the results of the Poll to date. Obviously the more participants the more representative the sample is going to be.

I hope that we can generate a pool of knowledge and opinions which I will make 'public' from time to time in an omnibus posting.

Multi Clicking

The particular Poll application I am using has some built in checking which tries to ensure that multi-clicking will not work. So if you feel that you want to change the Poll by shear number of clicks you may be prevented from doing so.

I did notice that when we tested this feature it was a little unreliable counting the number of votes cast for each question but I have decided to deploy the feature just the same to try it out. Please give a click and I can see how good it is. If anyone knows of a more reliable Polling tool, please let me know.

XML Conference on Content Management and Publishing

2006-04-25T15:09:00.000Z

I thought I would let you know about X-Pubs 2006 which is 'Europe's Largest XML Content Management and XML Publishing Conference to date'. I think that this could be a good event to visit if you have the time because there are areas of it which have some relevance to S1000D.

In looking through the programme there are numerous references to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) which is a parallel concept to S1000D. Born out of an IBM need to manage the internal Technical Publications for their software and applications, DITA is now in the public domain.

Some users claim that it is the answer to all Technical Publications needs and whilst it has the potential of meaningful metadata to provide some form of identification there is no uniform 'standard' for what this is. I understand that one or two proponents of DITA have put forward the idea that they should map DITA to S1000D.

DITA is almost exclusively XML based.

S1000D is already there

DITA is up and coming for some projects. S1000D is well established and provides a system of metadata which is very robust in its use.

DITA cross referencing is largely XML based which without a fair amount of work and agreement between its users is not likely to be suitable for projects such as the S1000D community are involved in which will span decades without hitch. That is what the refdm element gives us.

There was an internal discussion at Mekon where DITA and S1000D were covered in depth and I think that the consensus of opinion came down to a fairly simple rule of thumb:

If the equipment is purchased and maintained by part numbering the bits then S1000D is likely to be the answer. Where this is not the case then DITA could be the answer.

I did say that this was a simple rule of thumb.

Content Management

Given the versatility of some of the more recent Content Management systems it looks as though this area of the conference will yield a lot of interesting information and experiences.

Modern Content Management encompasses the identification and tracking of technical material and most application are extensible so it should not be rocket science to add onto some of these products metadata extraction and control functions to extend their use to S1000D. It could be that some of these applications work out cheaper and, perhaps, as versatile as some of the existing S1000D CSDB application.

Who is using it

I notice that in the Conferences' XML Technical Track, Scott Abel, a well known Content Management Technical Guy who is always looking to leverage maximum usefulness for the Publications Industry, is asking the Industry "Do software vendors who claim to support DITA actually use DITA themselves". This should result some interesting facts.

Incidentally Scott runs a well known Blog "The Content Wrangler". This is well worth watching and reading for the vast quantities of common sense that it has.

Choice of Event

In the meantime, if you have to choose between S1000D in Clearwater and this event, and if you are involved in the production of material to S1000D, then there is no competition - the Clearwater event is a must.

However if you can attend the X-Pubs 2006 event it looks as if a lot of very useful information will be on tap for you.

S1000D is Creeping outside the Defence Arena

2006-04-10T12:09:00.000Z

This is just a short entry to bring to your attention what I am sure is going to become a more common occurance.

It has been interesting to see the gradual migration of the S1000D specification to projects other than those in the Defence indiustry. For years I have been advocating this movement, first of all based on Def Stan 00-60 within the UK, and now, of course, with Issue 2 of S1000D itself. Both of these 'versions' of S1000D have the expanded structures required by projects other than those involved in Aerospace work.

In recent weeks my attention has been drawn to a 'civilian' project embarked upon by Lloyds of London - the people involved in defining how to determine if a vessel is seaworthy or not.

Mekon are involved in this and have issued a press release which outlines what has been achieved and the drivers for taking the S1000D route. The project included the migration of their existing SGML based solution into S1000D XML.

Anyone else doing this?

I am very concious of the fact that I am sometimes not best placed to discover other non military areas which are actually using S1000D (I do know about one or two who are seriously considering going down this route). So this is in the lines of another challenge (thanks for the response to the last one by the way) - So:

do you know of any other project using S1000D?
what were the drivers for using S1000D?
have the benefits been realised?

As usual, any feedback would be very interesting.

Just because it is there you don’t necessarily have to use it!

2006-03-27T08:54:00.000Z

Over the past four or five months I have been hearing stories (are they going to be apocryphal I wonder) about how some prospective users are going to be using S1000D. In the main these stories do seem to involve the same type of implementer – the XML junkie (am I being unkind?). These people have been looking at the DTDs / Schemas from a structure point of view without understanding the principles behind S1000D.

Some of the implementations that are being proposed are based on their normal experience. Unfortunately these implementations will not stand the test of time.

What, you may ask am I talking about here?

What S1000D Gives Us

The S1000D Specification provides us with the means to produce Technical Matter which is future proofed. It does this by using the non-proprietary storage format of SGML/XML. It also gives us the mechanisms to handle cross-referencing between DMs and the use of graphics which do not rely on filenames.

So what, you may say, we know all about that!

What some are trying to implement

Well, what I am hearing is that some who are trying to implement the S1000D specification are not aware of the purpose of the refdm mechanism. What they appear to be implementing is the standard XML method of anchors which of course relies on filenames.

What is worrying is that even when it is explained to them that this is not supposed to be used during authoring they fail to see why they should not use it. I guess that this is because they have not been involved in the Technical Publications Industry for very long and do not understand the significance of projects being live over 10, 20 or even 30 years. (See below for a challenge.)

With projects lasting this length of time the only sure thing is the Data Module Code. OK so we all know this, but apparently there are some who don't. Certainly in the training courses that I give in the UK and elsewhere this is one area which is covered and discussed. Some are quicker on seeing the advantages than others but all, in the end, see the benefits of the approach given to us in S1000D.

Having just completed courses in the past two months for some who are already users, I can confirm that there area aspects of the S1000D Specification which are not obvious. To be honest I am not surprised at this after all the PDF file which contains Issue 2 Change 2 is just under 55Mb big and over 2300 pages long (including blank pages etc). How does a newcomer to the S1000D world find their way around this without knowing where to look?

The Quick way?

Perhaps a two or three day course is a quick route to knowing what to do – or perhaps I am biased. Personally I get a great deal of enjoyment out of these courses. Meeting others involved in Technical Publications in a learning/discussion environment where we all learn from each other is very beneficial for all concerned. From these encounters with real people doing real work (some already involved in S1000D) provides even more background and we all benefit. Where some are having a specific difficulty that can be removed by a change in the S1000D Specification I encourage the delegate concerned to make a change request and in that way encourage them to take part in the S1000D ‘family of users’.

As you have probably realised by now, I don't like blowing my own trumpet too much but I do believe passionately in enabling people to work efficiently and from a position of knowledge. How else can they work properly.

This knowledge is required at different levels by

Managers who will need to oversee the implementation of S1000D Projects
Project Leaders who will need to actually put the knowledge and infrastructure in place for S1000D, and
The Authors who will need to get their hands dirty producing the data to S1000D

I know that my employer will be only too happy to quote you for organising a course on S1000D either here in the UK or elsewhere. Details can be found byfollowing this link to the Mekon Learning web page and this one to the Aerospace and Defence Training web page

The Challenge

As I was writing this Blog entry it occurred to me to enlist our readers vto find out just how long projects last. Of course some projects appear to go on for a very long time but there are often iterations of the equipment which are, to all intents and purposes, completely new projects i.e. a complete redesign with new documentation.

So the challenge for you is:
what is the longest running project with the same documentation?

The Limitations

I think that I would like to put some limitations on the challenge because I do remember visiting one UK MoD Establishment where I was shown documentation for the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters – still current because there a number of these marvellous aircraft still flying. Although these handbooks were still maintained, the level of activity was virtually zero so I think that perhaps we should stipulate that the actual project should still be active with documentation changes still taking place fairly regularly.

S1000D Clearwater Conference - Update

2006-03-02T16:47:00.000Z

We are now a month on from the last S1000D Blog posting and only a relatively short time to go before the conference and the organising committee has firmed up on some of the programme.

Some parts of the four-day event have changed quite a bit whilst retaining the main thrust. The new features include:

Training sessions
Feedback
Scorm Test Bed
Implementation and experience with Business Rules
Multimedia – a firming up on who are going to do the presentations
Standards Integration

Training Sessions

In looking at this area courses are being provided on S1000D Essentials, ADL Scorm essentials, SE, 3d and S1000D and Business Rules. Of course the problem for some will be “which one do I go to”?

Feedback

Here I presume we are going to be updated on the current state of discussions between the groups involved with S1000D. Being also involved with SAT iSpec2200 it will be very interesting for me to hear what is happening with them.

Implementation and Business Rules

Here is a vitally important aspect which is missing from S1000D. Already we are seeing projects which are starting without any rules in place and from some feedback that I am receiving one or two could be cause for some concern.

Multimedia

Here the committee have firmed up on the papers/business cases being presented to the delegates. One or two of the companies involved in the delivery of papers for this area of the conference do not immediately spring to mind as being suppliers of multimedia material.

The implementation of the delivery of multimedia, both in the control and display, is an area which is clearly going to grow in importance. Please, however, do not let us get too clever and miss the point of the output medium – the clear passing of information in the best form to the maintainer/trainee.

Standards

I guess that in this session we will see how the various presenters see the implementation of the S1000D Specification to their particular area of the world. I note that we have papers from Australia and the US DOD.

Let us hear from you

As usual I am very happy to hear from readers of this S1000D Blog. Contributions to the overall discussion are always welcome because they nearly always bring a different perspective on the topic.

I look forward to reading your comments about any of the issues raised here or even a new topic.

S1000D Clearwater Conference

2006-02-01T11:03:00.000Z

As some of you are probably aware, the draft programme for the S1000D Clearwater Conference is now available on the CTS Website which you can get at by following this link. The programme is dated 11th January 2006. We can see from the programme what the S1000D committee considers direction of the next thrust of the Specification to be. A link on this page (towards the bottom and in the Download box) provides access to the draft programme in PDF format.

The S1000D conference is scheduled to take place in Clearwater from 10 am on 30th May to 3pm on 2nd June of this year and it looks to be a packed programme for those interested in the topics. Of course a big part of any of these conferences is going to be the networking that takes place in the relatively small S1000D community. However, we must be aware that although small, the community is getting ever larger (just think about the Scorm and ATA initiatives).

The two whole days of the conference are devoted to:

Business Rules

Multimedia

Clearly both of these are very important however we should not forget the first day which is about Standards Integration, and the last day which covers the relationships between the various ‘partner’ organisations.

Business Rules
I realise that the S1000D Specification does not as yet have a section on Business rules (that is coming) but the programme shows a wide range of speakers who will clearly share there experiences. The different aspects of Business Rules will be covered including:

Acquisition

Implementation

Experience

I am sure that those involved in the drafting of the Business rules will listen to the Government view (perhaps we had a foretaste of that at the Lockheed event in August last year) and to the speakers who will cover their experience.

Here in the UK there are several projects running with Business Rules because that is an integral part of any MoD contract placed under Def Stan 00-60. Some of these business rules are better than others and some, I have noticed, have made some assumptions which could be argued as not strictly accurate.

Multimedia
With an ever-increasing sophistication of user guide requirements we are obviously going to need to keep in touch which what technology can do for us. Obviously it is important that we use the best tools for the job. What we must not loose sight of is the purpose of the documentation.

For the guy on the ground who is going to use the ‘handbook’ he needs to have all the information at his fingertips in a form that he can access rapidly, clearly, and succinctly. The last two of those is still down to the skill of the author – no amount of technology is going to help in that regard. Rapidly is obviously down to technology and design of the system to be used.
I certainly can see that there are times when a virtual reality presentation is going to help and one of these situations is going to be in training.
A personal plea from someone who was actually at the receiving end of user guides, handbooks or whatever you want to call them.
Never loose sight of the picture of a maintainer, at the top of a 50-foot (20 metre approx) mast in torrential rain and heavy seas trying to fix a complicated radar scanner. Just how do you give him the information he needs?
As we say in the UK – “answers on a postcard please”…..

Will you be at Clearwater? Leave a comment and let the rest of the S1000D community know.

S1000D Blog readers: Welcome to a Happy, Prosperous & Fruitful 2006

2006-01-17T14:40:00.000Z

S1000D changes afoot?
S1000Ders are, judging by the various items that I have heard about over the previous few months, due for a few changes. Inevitably some will be just clearing up S1000D ambiguities and others will be 'tweaks' to help in the generation of S1000D documents. However, some of the other changes may well enter the range on a scale of 9 out of 10.
S1000D users constantly tell me that they would greatly appreciate prior knowledge of the Specification's changed content at a draft stage before it gets 'published'. They believe that introducing this extra stage of perusal will only serve to enhance the 1000D Specification.
The introduction of this extra stage would need to be accompanied by a short phase of receipt of comments for consideration.
Could S1000D learn from ISO?
There are precedents, of course, for this course of action. The ISO committees work in this way - although I have to say that some of the ISO specifications take a long time to come out of the gestation process.
Or could the S1000D answer be in the W3C Model?
A much slicker method is that which is currently used by W3C. It might be worth having a quick look at the stages which W3C work with and see how they can be adapted for S1000D use. Click here for more details:

Recommendation-

Proposed Recommendation

Proposed Edited Recommendations-

Candidate Recommendations

Working Drafts of which there are three varieties.

I won't elaborate on these stages because I am sure you can go to the W3C site and look up the definitions and relate them to what you would perhaps like to see in the S1000D development cycle. Perhaps we could have a debate about what the ideal S1000D Cycle should be.I am not proposing that the S1000D specification is considered in its entirety each time since this would be not be sensible. However, the areas of change (or proposed change) could be submitted to a modified W3C system of updating/modifying. I am certainly not advocating taking away from the TPSMG or the EPWG (and other groups) the control of the specification since it is very important that there is a strong core group to make sure that the overall aim of the specification is not lost. However I do feel that the S1000D Specification could perhaps do with extra pairs of eyes being cast over it during development and I can see that this would, is some way, reduce the workload of the committees. I would particularly welcome this in regard to the Candidate Recommendation which, according to the W3C site has the following purpose (the italics are mine):
"A Candidate Recommendation is a document that W3C believes has been widely reviewed and satisfies the Working Group's technical requirements. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to gather implementation experience."
Of course introducing any extra stages would slow down the cycle of activity but are we all of one mind on this? If it means that we go a bit slower in the development of S1000D to get a Specification which is more straightforward to implement and which provides more guidance on what is intended by the various functions, structures, etc that we find in its 2000+ pages is that not a good thing?
I hope that we can have serious discussions on the S1000D blog. There is, of course, no guarantee that the various S1000D committees will take on board what happens on this Blog.

S1000D & SGML - Who should know what?

2005-12-16T16:23:00.000Z

This post is relevant to S1000D, so bear with me… I have recently been involved in helping a company that is receiving SGML files (not S1000D) from a sub-contractor. Having looked at some of these files it is obvious that the material being supplied is far from perfect, and I really mean far.

The problem that I have been encountering is that the staff at the receiving company does not have much real understanding of SGML. So even after I pointed them in the direction of a really good free SGML Parser with a Windows front end - they did not know what to do with it, the significance of the reports it was going to give them or even how to find out what exactly is wrong with the files.

So what has this got to do with S1000D?
It is becoming increasingly obvious that this lack of understanding is a problem which is also affecting the work in the S1000D arena. As more companies get involved in the production of Data Modules the lack of knowledge is going to cause increasing difficulties. We have already seen this happening in the UK and with the US gradually moving to S1000D the problem is only going to get worse.

If everyone is working with configured SGML Editors that is fine, but as we know some editors are better than others.

It is where someone is not using a properly configured editor, or they have undertaken some conversion work (perhaps using search and replace in a text editor), or where a text editor has been used for some of the work that problems are likely to occur.

Working S1000D is going to result in huge numbers of Data Modules being sent between companies. Because of this:

- Part of any dispatching process has to be the checking of the delivery for conformance.
- Part of any receiving process has to be checking the delivery for conformance.
- There must be at least one person in a company who understands something about SGML.

Obvious? Perhaps not.

From the comments I am receiving this clearly is not the case in the S1000D and other environments. Indeed, when I mention this requirement to the person making the comment to me for the most part they seem to think that I am speaking a foreign language.

The contract placed on a company working with S1000D is to provide S1000D Compliant Data Modules. Unless the company sending them has independently checked, then how can the QA system indicate that they have complied with the contract. Unless the receiving company has independently checked the Data Modules, how can they show in the QA system that the supplying company has complied with the contract placed on them? Also, if the incoming S1000D Data Modules are not 'behaving' correctly in their SGML editing environment how will they be able to say whose fault it is (i.e. the Data Modules, the Editing Software, or the delivery system)?

To make this work it is obvious that there must be at least one person within a company who is partially knowledgeable about SGML/XML. I think that these people must have the following minimum skills:

- Understand, at least in outline, what SGML/XML is about
- Understand the tools that are required for Editing
- Understand the tools required for checking the Data Modules
- Have sufficient knowledge to interpret the output from the checking software so that the 'faults' can be apportioned to the right area.

And then of course - Business Rules

This brings us back to S1000D and Business Rules. Not that S1000D is the only place where business rules have a place; ATA iSpec 2200 projects also need them.

Without Business Rules it is not possible to have consistent Data Modules (except by accident that is).

The Business Rules will clearly contain the process that should occur:

- prior to delivery,
- during delivery, and
- when receiving packages .

Clearly the appropriate processes above will include steps to independently check the S1000D Data Modules for, at the very minimum, compliance with the correct DTD.

Where or What Next for S1000D?

2005-11-30T10:21:00.000Z

S1000D Issue 2 Change 2 is issued and I think we all know that the various committees are now working towards S1000D Issue 2 Change 3. And a thought occurred to me (yes - my grey cells do work occasionally) - what would the greater S1000D community, i.e. the people who are working with the S1000D Specification, like to see in the way of enhancements, modifications removals or a wish list.

I know that we all have a common language and some of my S1000D support work reminds me just how common some words are (a joke of course). So I thought that I would define what I mean by each. A couple of the definitions may seem close to each other but I put them in never the less, if only to perhaps provoke some discussion. I have put examples in some of the definitions but of course they may be my ideas alone or something that I have heard others discussing.

Modifications to S1000D

This category can be defined as a change that will make the functionality of S1000D more useful as a vehicle for data. Let us not forget that the sole purpose of S1000D is to provide a maintainer/trainer with the information that is required to enable him/her to carry out their work efficiently and accurately.

From time to time there is obviously a need to modify the S1000D so that it can, for example, keep in touch with technology. The move towards XML is a prime example of this. But my plea is that the modifications to S1000D should be for the common good and not just because one specific branch would really like the change.

Enhancements to S1000D

This category can be defined as a change that will make working with S1000D easier or simpler. The sort of thing that might be included here is a change in the S1000D structure which will not affect the overall way in which the authors author the S1000D Data Modules.

An example of this, although I do realise that the structure has been changed now, was the specpara content. In a project that I was at the receiving end of it was obvious that the people authoring the DMs had not realised that they were creating normal content whilst in the specpara structure. It was possible to create content using the paragraph element on its own without a warning, caution or note.

I know that a comprehensive Business Rules Checker could and should be made to trap this but surely anything that would make this unlikely in the first place would have been preferable. I know that such a structure was devised and the end result was indistinguishable from that created by the original, so output devices such as IETP rendering would not have been affected.

Removals from S1000D

As in all specifications, S1000D must have some structures which are not used.

We have the ability to mix Issue/Change DMs in publications. (Honest, despite what some say and if your CSDB cannot handle this then get the provider to change it so that it can.) Because we have this ability to mix DMs there is no need to retain some of the structures that were there previously just because "They have always been there." I am sure that some of you can think of items that fall into this category.

Personally I think that this category has a fairly low priority compared with the others.

Wish List for S1000D

This category can be defined as something that, as a producer of material using the S1000D specification, you feel would make your work easier.

I suppose one possible inclusion in this list would be a better definition of what each of the elements should be used for. There is plenty of material about the content of the Data Module Code, after all there are tables giving the first three characters in the SNS code and the IC code. But what about a definitive statement on how the remainder of the (say) six SNS characters should be handled? Given that the first three characters are hierarchical should not the remainder follow that principle?

If something is proposed in the specification, should there not be a good example of how the S1000D committee intends it to be used.

OK, I realise that Business Rules will take care of these two, but what about the following:

1. Giving the wider S1000D community the opportunity to look at the proposals before they get incorporated into S1000D.
2. Do not tinker with S1000D for the sake of it.
3. If there is a change to S1000D perhaps provide the reason for it - I think that this item alone would remove a few of the grumbles that I hear about S1000D.

So what do you think about these categories?

S1000D 101: Before You Start - an Overview of the Initial Stages of Working with S1000D

2005-11-03T15:13:00.000Z

The first in the series of S1000D 101 is now available. It is too large to be sensibly put onto this Blog so to get “Before you Start - an overview of the initial stages of working with S1000D” follow this link to the PDF file.

This paper puts forward a very neutral view of what is required to start working with S1000D. It is not exhaustive and takes a very independent line on S1000D software requirements and talks about functions in general.

My thoughts about comments still stand. If you would like to write something which puts another point of view please feel free. If you feel that you can contribute with a neutral paper on S1000D which is not overtly linked to a specific application please get in touch. If you have an "S1000D White Paper" on your company's site that extols the virtues of a particular S1000D application we will be interested and could possibly provide a link to it in some way.

S1000D 101: Getting Started Series

2005-10-31T16:52:00.000Z

Further to a regular S1000D blog reader’s suggestion, I’d like to put together a series on getting started on S1000D. Suggested post titles include:

- Is S1000D right for you?
- Choosing authoring, database and IETP software
- Creating a DMRL and S1000D business rules
- A comparison between a 'standard' technical manual and an S1000D technical manual: which information goes where?

I’ve made a start with the first installment (called "Before you Start - an overview of the initial stages of working with S1000D"), which I will post in the next day or two. My company, Mekon, have kindly agreed to host the full article as a PDF which you can download from their website. If one of you would like to contribute a further article on this phase of Getting started please let me know and we can probably build up a 'Library' of other views.

I will put together other articles on the various subjects over the next few weeks and hopefully we can repeat the exercise. I will attempt to be fiercely independent in what the articles contain but other articles can, of course, take on a bias from vendors if they wish. Let me know in the comments section below what other areas I can walk people through.

S1000D blog by e-mail

2005-10-25T14:00:00.000Z

I’ve just added a new feature that allows readers to sign-up to receive my S1000D blog by e-mail. Don’t worry, this won’t be e-mail overload, you’ll just receive 1 e-mail with all the posts from that day. If I don’t post, you don’t receive! Simply add your e-mail to the box on the right. Meanwhile, you can still subscribe to my S1000D blog RSS feed too.

Removed comments

2005-10-10T10:42:00.000Z

Unfortunately I had to take the unprecedented step of removing a comment from this blog. Regular, unhelpful poster,Mr Anonymous, decided to change from unfounded generalities to comments directed against a specific company and person. This blog was set up to help the community, not to allow bitter individuals to expend their pent up frustrations in a public forum. I am happy for people to post anonymous comments, but will not tolerate people hiding behind anonymity to attempt to disrupt the flow of information. Mr Anonymous - your comments attacking others are not welcome on this forum. Blogging technology is free for all to use and readily available from Blogger. Please set up your own blog to persecute your individual campaign if that is what you wish.

An initial view of the presentations at S1000D Munich

2005-10-07T10:56:00.000Z

I did sort of promise I would try and get some contributions from delegates to the S1000D Autumn conference in Munich. This has been more difficult than I had hoped so I managed to persuade Julian Murfit of Mekon Ltd to put pen to paper for me. Below is his contribution which throws up to some extent the direction that the S1000D Specification is taking.

"Martyn - here's my take on what has been going on at the S1000D event:

Keynote address and upcoming standards
The key note speeches at the S1000D/SCORM event set the scene on Wednesday with a particularly dynamic presentation from Paul Haslam and Tim Tate on the new aspects to the standard and developments in SCORM. It was interesting to learn of the new standards S3000L Procedure Handbook for LSA and S4000A Procedure Handbook for Scheduled Maintenance Analysis - adding to the already established S1000D and S2000M.

Business Rules
From my perspective the hottest topic at this event has been Business Rules. This may come as little surprise because the event is being held in Europe where S1000D has been used for several years on many projects. The result is the realisation that each project has implemented S1000D in different ways causing interesting problems for sub-contractors to provide valid and acceptable data modules. Today Mike Day presented his perspective on the plans for Business Rules drawing on his experience at Rolls Royce. His very stimulating and often amusing presentation concluded with the point that BREX (the Business Rules Exchange) file is a good start to solving the difficulties, but it is clear that more work is required to harmonise how BR are presented and what they contain.

Many thanks to Julian.

The S1000D Conference update

2005-10-05T13:54:00.000Z

As most of you are already aware, the S1000D Autumn conference kicked off today in Munich. For those like me who were unable to attend and in an effort to broaden participation in this S1000D Blog I have asked some people that are attending to act as 'Guest' bloggers to give us their views on:

- the presentations
- the information being provided
- the future of S1000D
- the implications of some moves as they see it.

I hope that they will be able to submit their blog entries either as it happens, or in the evening. Either way, the S1000D blog will be kept up to date.

Of course one of the problems is that there are those who will not like to be identified. I shall of course respect their wish to remain anonymous because we all understand the pressures of some companies for their staff to tow the party line.

Don’t forget, you can sign up to my RSS feed to be alerted as soon as this blog is updated.

The European S1000D Forum

2005-09-22T10:50:00.000Z

For those who have not yet picked up on this event, a brief introduction: Recently there have been two Forum type meetings per year, one in Clearwater in the US, and the other in Munich, Germany. At these forums the S1000D fraternity gets to hear the latest news about S1000D from those involved in its production (and others). Some may remember that the S1000D Issue 2 Change 2 was made available at Clearwater in May this year. The Munich event this year takes place from Wednesday 8th October to Friday 10th October. You can find details on the CTS Website.

Unfortunately I am not going to be there this year but there do seem to be a number of topics which have been raised both on this Blog and in other locations. Out of the many S1000D relegated subjects I noted the following:

Wednesday Morning

EPWG - View of the Future - This is interesting in trying to find out where they think S1000D is going in terms of functionality etc.

ASD/AIA/ATA - Current Situation and Future Plans - This interest me because I am involved in Authoring software for both S1000D and ATA iSpec 2200. So any glimmerings of how they think the combining is going to come to fruition are of more than passing interest.

Friday Morning

Business Rules - This is at the hub of the S1000D usage and cross project use. Recently I was talking with a supplier to the UK MoD who has supplied equipment to two parts of the same UK project which have different business rules.

A lot of the programme is going to give insight to the S1000D working. Of course it is also very interesting to hear how others have already incorporated the S1000D philosophy into projects that they are involved in and their experiences. After all, a good part of the way the S1000D specification evolves should be from the experiences of those actually (to use a colloquial UK phrase) at the coal face. I know that there has to be a committee involved in pushing S1000D forward, but unless there is learning from experience the usefulness can be problematic. I realise that often two different projects have different experiences, but a common ground can often be found.

A Standards Based Publishing Forum - Including S1000D

2005-09-08T13:41:00.000Z

Recently my attention has been drawn to a Forum which is totally focused on Standards Based Publishing. This forum is hosted by Architag International Corporation in the USA.

Of particular interest to me and to this Blog is the fact that there is a forum for S1000D. It would seem that the S1000D forum has been there since May 2003. At present the S1000D forum does not appear to have a lot of traffic which is a bit of a shame, but if it is relatively unknown then are we surprised? This is my bit to promote something that I believe could be worthwhile and already in existence.

Standards Based Publishing

2005-09-08T13:37:00.000Z

Having been involved in Technical Publishing and S1000D for more years that I care to remember I have consistently met projects which need to be produced to a Specification quoted in the various supplied bid documents. As a number of you have probably experienced, the fact that a Specification is quoted is often not the end of the story. Many projects, particularly prior to the advent of SGML and S1000D, paid very loose lip service to the quoted specification.

When is a Standard Not a Standard?
I wish I could have a bar of gold for every time I have heard the phrase "Ah, yes, I know that is what it says in the Bid Document, but we use XYZ version of it which is detailed in document AB". Having then given you the document AB you find that they don't quite follow that either. Oh yes, they claim to have very good reasons for following that. I was hoping that the advent of S1000D was going to put an end to that especially with users realising that S1000D will only work properly if Business Rules are written (sensibly) and applied properly.

I have very recently heard of a project that is supposed to be following S1000D but in fact, yes you have guessed it, they have their own version of S1000D, indeed they have tweaked the DTD. I am so glad that I do not write publications for major projects anymore.

Where is FrameMaker going?

2005-09-05T15:15:00.000Z

For some years I have been monitoring various user groups to do with SGML and XML via the newsgroups comp.text.sgml & comp.text.xml. In the same area of newsgroups there is comp.text.frame where structured and non-structured FrameMaker discussions take place.

Again and again over the years there have been comments along the lines of "Where is FrameMaker going?” There have been doom and gloom postings announcing 'sources' saying that there will be no further development, closely followed by those saying that 'they have heard' that development is still going on. For the last couple of years I have had more than a passing interest in this discussion because the company that I work for has structured FrameMaker applications to support various Specifications (including S1000D).

It was in one of these groups that I spotted a link to FrameMaker 2005 Chautauqua™ taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA (7th to 9th November). I notice that there are several addresses by Adobe staff including the keynote address by Karl Matthews entitled "The Future of Adobe FrameMaker: 7.1 and Beyond". Is this where they are going to announce full support for XML Schemas?

As part of my general philosophy mentioned in the first posting in this Blog "The Start of a Conversation about S1000D" I would be interested in hearing the views of others involved in the use and development of FrameMaker.

P.S. Perhaps more in keeping with the context of this Blog is the paper being given by Julian Murfitt of Mekon on the third day called "S1000D Introduction" which will provide a good high level briefing on S1000D and some of the implications of implementation. More information on this to follow soon.

What's in a Profile?

2005-09-02T09:17:00.000Z

CGM files come in four main varieties CGM v1 through to CGM v4 with each of them introducing a new feature.
I am not a graphics Guru but I got involved in this very useful format a few years ago when the standard was increased from CGM v2 to CGM v3. The jump to CGM v3 introduced the functionality of Bezier Curves. Because the viewer could not handle this ‘new’ feature some some graphics were displayed with bits missing. The jump from v3 to the current v4 introduced HotSpots.
Straightforward? You would think so!
Like a number of other standards, CGM graphics need to be tailored to give make them comply with S1000D Business Rules.Some may remember than an earlier post was about Business rules.
Illustration Sizes
Within the S1000D Specification it clearly gives information about the dimensions of 'Board' for sizes of illustration e.g. Full page, Half page, Fold Out etc (see Chapter 3.9.2 Table 1). I have seen illustrations which do not comply with this requirement. This resulted in a group of graphics with all sorts of sizes giving inconsistent display behaviour.
Profile
The specification also indicates which profile should be used. Up to and including Issue 2 Change 1 the specification mandated the use of the ATA profile. The profile is stated as being “ATA CGM profile (GREXCHANGE V2.6 or higher) as defined in ATA iSpec 2200, Chap 5-2-4 – Graphics Exchange”.
The reason that I have mentioned this is because I have encountered some illustrations that have not been exported from Graphic packages using the correct profile attached. The inevitable result of this is that some graphic viewers are not handling the illustrations very well because they do not recognize some of the profile items. A common reason for this change is that the Graphics Package has been upgraded to the latest version and I presume that the previous default settings have lost.
How can you tell how the file has been exported correctly? A quick, but not infallible, test is to open the graphic file in a text editor and view the first part which is more or less in plain text. There should be a mention of a profile in the header area.
Of course, the very latest issue of the S1000D Specification has changed the profile. We wait with interest the outcome of the first publications created to the latest change.

The Importance of Rules

2005-08-26T16:17:00.000Z

A recent meeting for Lockheed Technical Publications Personnel in Fort Worth had as its theme S1000D and the US Government and Industry Transition to this Specification. The meeting was well attended over two days. It was arranged and hosted by a superb team headed by Drex Rutledge, Director of Technical Publications at Lockheed Martin. This meeting was entitled a Consortium and all were encouraged to take part. There was a number of speakers who were actively involved in the guiding of the specification through the various hurdles both in the U.S. and Internationally.

Of particular interest was the attitude of the DoD allied speakers who made it very clear that they were waiting for the Business Rules to be written. One of the drivers for this decision was experience of other projects which were carried out to a Mil Spec but the data was not interchangeable because of the wide range of interpretations.

A few years ago I was involved in large project within the UK which had S1000D at it centre. The work was carried out by a number of contractors - there were no business rules - and it too suffered from a range of different interpretations.

Later, the UK introduced Business Rules as a central part of its Defence Standard 00-60 specification which included Technical Publications as a core part. Although general guidance was given as to what these rules should contain it was obvious that some of the writers had not had experience of actually creating publications. I hope that the US has more practical view on the purpose of these rules.

Keep up to date with posts on this Blog

2005-08-26T14:00:00.000Z

Keep up to date with posts on this Blog by subscribing to my RSS Feed

For those readers who are aware of the features of RSS feeds it may be of interest to know that this Blog can be obtained via this link. So that you do not get swamped with text I have limited what you get via your reader to 255 characters. You can, of course, see the whole post by following the link on your reader page.

Personally I find the RSS feeds a very useful way of keeping up to date with several technology areas without having to take all the news. The ability to view 'Headlines' and then select the articles that I want to read saves a considerable amount of time.

For those who have not seen this excellent way of keeping in touch but don't know where to start why not go here where there is a list of readers. You can even put RSS Readers into Google and get a long list of suitable suggestions.

I personally use the SharpReader application because of the nice way it presents the various feeds and their articles. I do know that you can get an Extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser to enable you to read the RSS feeds.

I am in good company offering this 'Service'. Other well known sources of RSS Feeds include the BBC (a large number of focused feeds as well as News), OASIS Press and CNET News (their Security offering is very well worth looking at). There are hundreds of Feeds, surely something for everyone.

The Start of a Conversation about S1000D

2005-08-26T09:27:00.000Z

As part of my general philosophy of sharing information, help, problems etc., it has occurred to me that it might be a good idea to have a forum for discussing the S1000D Specification. This is particularly important right now with our Friends in the USA starting to come on board and beginning to look at using the Specification.

Judging from some of the emails that I have been getting there seems to be some difficulties in understanding some of the concepts of the Specification and how to apply it. The UK has been involved in producing information to this Specification for some years. Looking at the wide range of understanding how it should be applied, and what should be put where, this forum is a little overdue.

Sometimes I believe that I can be a little provocative by making statements which may seem to be calculated to start an argument - please forgive this behaviour in advance. It is intended to be thought provoking and not intended to get up peoples backs.

I hope that this forum will become a 'conversation' and look forward to any feedback and comments that might arise.

S1000D - "sense out of confusion"

Survey so far

The Results

What S1000D Issue are you using?

Are you using a CSDB

The Survey area of the Blog Page

S1000D Conference in the UK

Business Rules White Paper

A Small Error

Business Rules Creation

Basic Starting Point

The Business Rules Team

Different Types of Data Module

It is a really excellent start

WYSINWYE Part 2

Defining Graphic Reproduction Measurements

Have you spotted any anomalies?

WYSINWYE - - Part 1

An ISO 8879 problem

A New Blog Survey

Why?

What are we asking?

Which version

Are you using a CSDB

Why has the type of survey been changed?

The end of another eventful year

ATA and S1000D

S1000D Functionality

So to the Break

Users Forum

Integration of Documentation

Use the Forum Time Wisely

US S1000D Event in October 2009

Tracks

Link

Attendance

UK Event

Preston Event Cancelled

An S1000D UK Event in May this year

S1000D Issue 4

Element Names

subpara1 to n and para0

step1 to step n

keepwithnext

level attribute

Other things

Something from Issue 3

Budapest

S1000D Bike Pack PDF on the ASD Web Site

What do you think?

The Mekon Book

X-Pubs and S1000D

Retirement Looms - but not being put out to grass

What does this mean for me?

S1000D Sample BikePack Publication Available

What is it that is being made available?

How do I get it the example files?

Mekon's MD Tries to Drum up Business

Catching Up on S1000D Business

Adobe Road Show with FrameMaker 8

ASD S1000D Issue 3 is Published

S1000D Oslo event

X-Pubs 2007 - Update on Aerospace and Defence interest sessions

X-Pubs news - More S1000D Related Presentations

Harvey Greenberg - XyEnterprise

Wayne Gafford from ADL SCORM

S1000D @ Oslo

Updated Programme and other Details

Networking - Valuable use of Time

S1000D Issue 2 Change 3 now available

New Structures

Sample Data

S1000D and this years X-Pubs Event - More Detail

S1000D Specific Content

Other content of interest to S1000D users

S1000D and this years X-Pubs Event

Topics and Tracks

Further Information

S1000D and Oslo in October

Programme