The European S1000D Forum

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.