Friday, October 07, 2005

An initial view of the presentations at S1000D Munich

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.

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