RE: Adjectives vs nouns

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hanna, Rob [mailto:Rob.Hanna@wolterskluwer.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 11:53 AM
> 
> > The question is, from what should it be specialized? Should it be a 
> > document type specialized from the abstract <description> type, or 
> > should it be a document type specialized from a virtually identical 
> > abstract type?
> 
> I believe that the content should be specialized from the 
> actual <abstract> element given its positioning within the 
> topic structure. I wouldn't expect to abstract or generalize 
> the information in a Record-type topic beyond what is 
> described for the specialized
> <abstract>: date, time, location, etc. And I wouldn't repeat 
> this information in the topic body. Instead, I would use the 
> specialized topic body to provide more interpretive 
> information about the actual event.

I agree with your points here, but I was talking about the topic as a
whole, and you're talking about its pre-body child elements <summary>,
<stamp>, <date-time>, <location>, and <occurrence> (which must be
contained in a specialization of <abstract>).

The question I was asking is whether we specialize <record> from
'something' in the abstract layer:

        |--Procedural
        |--Explanatory
topic---+--Descriptive
        |--Advisory
        |--Criterial
        |--'something' --- <record>

or alternatively specialize <record> from the abstract <descriptive>
type, along with <resource> and possibly a BusDocs simplification of
<reference>:

        |--Procedural     | <reference> (busdocs)
        |--Explanatory ---+ <resource>
topic---+--Descriptive    | <record>
        |--Advisory
        |--Criterial

(I have qualms about specializing simplified BusDocs doctypes called
<concept>, <task>, and <reference> from the abstract layer, parallel to
the standard base types specialized directly from <topic>. We and the
rest of the TC would need to think through the technical and political
aspects of that very carefully. It may be that there's no issue because
content sharing is so diminished in business docs, and practically nil
between business docs and tech docs. And after all we are talking about
a framework within which specialization can proceed in an orderly way
that is scalable and supportable in the future as DITA is more widely
adopted for enterprise business documents. The specializations will
happen anyway, and without guidance could be a big mess in short order.)

	/Bruce