Peter Fiander, Directorate for Procurement Management Policy, UK
Betty
Harvey, Electronic Commerce Connection,Inc. USA
Helium Mak, National Research
Council, CANADA
Yoshiaki Tanaka, Nippon CALS Research Partnership (NCALS),
JAPAN
Nigel Shaw, EuroSTEP, ENGLAND
Masaru Suzuki, Nippon CALS Research
Partnership (NCALS), JAPAN
Hugh Tucker, Documenta ApS, DENMARK
King Yee,
Boeing Aircraft, USA
Daniel Rivers-Moore, Fine Line Publishing Services, UK
William
Gruttke, Grumman Data System/NIST, USA
Gerry , CGC, USA
Eric Lebegue,
ESPRI CONCEPT, France
Brian Matthews, Rutherford Appleton Lab., UK
Juergen Kunz, Institut fuer Rechneranwendung
in Planung und Konstruktion,
Universitaet Karlsruhe
Hugh Tucker, chair of T14, opened the meeting on Monday, Oct. 7, 1996, following the SC4 plenary. The attendees introduced themselves and the agenda was discussed and accepted.
The Agenda had changed from the pre-meeting agenda. Tuesday had been arranged to be a "SGML-day." The following presentations will be given on Tuesday:
The minutes from the Toronto meeting were accepted.
Sunday meeting (SGML, STEP and the InterNet) attracted 30+ people and was a great success – it should be repeated.
The White Paper has been presented in several additional places over the last year.
The presentation is also available on the WEB site. The presentations are available on our web for viewing / downloading: http://www.eccnet.com/step/ courtesy of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. and Betty Harvey.
The Chair pointed out that the following recommendation from the Toronto minutes had been followed. It was pointed out that the answers to architectures such as the proposed one from the NCALS group might vary - depending upon the application.
It was suggested that T14 should work on:
Several of the participants declared that they were ready to support "proof of concept" projects in this area.
It was noted that one of the essential goals (besides the future ideas that are being worked on) should be to provide an architecture for interoperability with legacy data, i.e., data that is stored in other repositories and in other formats.
Requirements that are primarily needed are:
Note: Ernie O'Dell noted that technical writers used to have to start from scratch when reproducing graphics. Today, 3-D models are available that can be rotated and snapshots produced for useful documentation.
A presentation and discussion of the past activities of T14 was given for the newcomers.
It was discussed if the goals of T14 should be changed—given that the above goals are beginning to be achieved. Suggestions were put that new goals should be established for T14. Some of the goals that were discussed were:
http://www.echo.lu/oii
http://www.sgml.u-net.com
http://www.eccnet.com/step/
Invited guest: Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre
Betty Harvey gave a presentation on IETM's The presentation covered the following topics:
The presentation slides are available on-line.
The presentation focused on what IETMs are. Ms. Harvey emphasized that allowing SGML Information Objects during the engineering process can greatly reduce the time and cost for creating technical documentation. Technical documentation includes, paper TM's, IETMs and Computer Based Training, as well as traditional training manuals.
Martin Bryan – SGML / DSSSL / HyTime
Martin presented a background of standardized character coded sets and the SGML methods of interchanging them.
Martin discussed the "Families of Standards" associated with SGML environments: MHEG, SMSL, MPEG, JPEG, JBIG, SPDL, SDIF, SGML, DSSSL, SPDL, FONTS, HyTime, etc.
DSSSL & HyTime
DSSSL-O (nline) general formatting for word processing + additional facilities like scrolling. (JADE)
SGML Grove – Graphical representation of Property values.
SDQL - Standard query language for dealing with SGML trees.
Discussion of Contributed Paper "Configuration Management of Product Documentation"
After the presentation at the Dallas meeting, Reiner Reschke and Hugh Tucker volunteered to elaborate on the ideas and concepts that were discussed at the meeting. There was a short workshop arranged in Germany in May and the resulting papers have been edited and revised over the summer. The present version, which is still being worked on, is available on the Web site.
The paper presents the architectural background for configuring product documentation into a hybrid environment that could provide management of information using the same tools as are used for product data management.
The fundamental thesis of the paper points out that providing these facilities are dependent upon three architectural features:
Information objects are presented in the paper as the essential building blocks that are needed to move documentation information from product models to publishing models. Information objects are used as the lowest level of granularity in the product data model. They are the mechanism for moving information between the information structures of STEP and SGML.
Information objects are application specific SGML strings representing semantic blocks of information. There are two key points with information objects:
The granularity of these blocks allows them to be used in modelling product data as well as product documentation.
The format of the information objects (SGML_STRING) allow them to be modelled and used vis-à-vis in EXPRESS models/instances and SGML DTDs/instances.
Wednesday morning the TC14 committee held a joint meeting with WG10. Hugh Tucker gave a brief presentation and told WG10 of the progress of the TC14 group.
WG10 voted and approved a Stage 0 project. It was a agreed that WG10 would draft a proposal to go to the Secretariate. This proposal would be passed on to T14 for comment within 22 days from March 5. The Stage 0 item would involve investigating SGML requirements and a feasibility study.
AP 232 was chosen as the test AP. The results of the Stage 0 item would result in potential Work Items. The proposal should be completed 6 weeks before the San Diego meeting.
ISO/IPO Meeting: San Diego, USA, June 1-6, 1997
ISO Meeting: Florence, Italy, October 19-24, 1997
ISO/IPO Meeting: USA, January 1998
It is planned that T14 will meet at each of these activities.