S1000D and Oslo in October

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!