S1000D Issue 2 Change 3 now available

After a slight hiccough S1000D Issue 2 Change 3 is now available at the downloads page on the S1000D.org website. For a short while version 9 of the Specification was available but now v10 is there. This is contained in a zip file "s1000d_Iss_2-3_r1.zip". I suppose that some time we will find out why the stutter - but does it really matter?

The S1000D Specification is even bigger than before running to a total of 2588 pages and contains several new structures. For those who want a quick view of what has changed there is a separate file available helpfully called DMC-AE-A-00-00-0000-00A-003A-A_004-00.pdf on the web site.

New Structures

There are four new structures available:

Technical Repository
Container
Product cross-reference table
Technical conditions cross-reference table

I have no doubt that we will hear more about these in the future. There have been rumours of some of these over the past 12 months or so with a variety of comments, some derogatory and others almost ecstatic.

As to other changes, well they are quite numerous with some of them being more of a clarification rather than a new 'feature'.

Sample Data

Included in this release is part of an updated Bike Pack. I have not had chance to have a look at these yet. According to the Web Site only four data types have been provided:

Descriptive
Procedural
Publication Module
BREX

I know from my position of someone who supports S1000D and who also has to demonstrate S1000D compliant applications to prospective clients the usual groan runs along the lines of "can you show us something useful - not the Bike Pack". Of course the problem here is that most of the material that we have belongs to our clients and for confidentiality reasons we cannot use customer provided DMs can we?

I am sure that we all look forward to getting the next bunch of DMs so that we can build up some sort of test suite.

Have you had a chance to look at the new version? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.