US S1000D Event in October 2009

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.

(Logist - Link to WWW Virtual Library "http://www.logisticsworld.com/logistics/glossary.asp?query=Logist&search=exactterm&form=show&acr=show&ref=show&rel=show&srl=show&llk=show&wiz=show&num=&hst=show&mode=")

Preston Event Cancelled

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

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

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.