Congility S1000D is only a couple of months away

The Programme is Ready

Have you noticed just how quickly time passes by. It is now about two months to the "Congility S1000D" conference and the programme is now finalised and it promises to be of the usual high standard.
My contacts with clients, and prospective clients, has highlighted several areas of interest and concern which may well originate from a lack of knowledge on their part. Let me give you just four examples:

• Applicability
• Practical Business Rules and its relation to the BREX
• Legacy Conversion
• The path from an LSA to S1000D

It is not my intention here to give chapter and verse of these topics but just to highlight the fact that the conference has got these covered.

Applicability

The topic of Applicabiity has been of interest for several years and over this time S1000D's model has got more sophisticated. The latest incarnation in Issue 4.1 does look to provide a number of examples which are relevant to the larger projects with multiple platform versions and extended number of modifications and service bulletins. Jeff Deskin of Corena has knowledge of these problems as a result of his work with the Life*S1000D CSDB which has the capability of handling this area of the Specification

Practical Business Rules and its relation to the BREX

Business Rules is an area of the S1000D Specification which is at the focus of considerable work. Some of you will have noticed changes in the Specification which help to focus the users attention of things that should be considered when working on a project. The work is ongoing but it is always useful to have a real life project view of this area. Lundqvist of Saab will enlighten us in this area. I know that a number of the S1000D Business Rules Technical Team will be there to have their brains picked if you have further questions.

Legacy Conversion

Ever since my involvement in S1000D as part of the early Def-Std 0060 days the subject of Legacy Conversion has been raised. There is a fair amount of material still in other formats, structured and unstructured, which may or may not be worth considering for conversion. To convert or not to convert is the first question quickly followed by the question: "how are we going to do it". In the early days I devised scripting to convert Formatted Word files into S1000D Data Modules. If the original had been written using the styles provided the conversion was very good and extremely rapid. Of course sometimes conversion was not 100%, but naturally often the original was not 100% perfect. This topic is being covered by Adrian Jordan (Mekon) and Graham Every (Graham Every Ltd) who have experience in this area. Go pick their brains as well.

The path from an LSA to S1000D

In the dim and distant days of Def-Stan 0060 the link between the LSA(R) and S1000D was built in (as was the link to S2000M). The problem was that the basic LSA Specification (1388 I seem to remember) needed some work to make it really suitable for migration of data into S1000D Data Modules. Not an easy task.
Things move on and Peter Zimmerman of Cassidian is going to be discussing just this problem and the ASD methodology to achieve this migration using S10003X and S3000L.

Are You Ready?

I hope that you will be able to be at the conference. As in most examples of good conferences the bonus feature is the ability to have meaningful conversations with other Professionals in the same area of work. S1000D is still a foreign word in a lot of places and it can feel isolating to be working in this area.

In these hard times networking (sorry about that word) with others working in the S1000D area can be a very good investment in both time and money. Hopefully we will see you there.