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.
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