RE: [dita] Groups - Issue #12038 - Proposal: Acronyms and other AbbreviatedForms

[Kara Warburton <KARA@CA.IBM.COM>]

Hi Erik,

I agree with your proposal. The acronym proposal and glossary proposal
should be considered together.

Kara Warburton
IBM Terminology
905-413-2170

IBM Intranet links:
Terminology WIKI: https://w3.webahead.ibm.com/w3ki/display/IBMterm/Home
IBM terminology: http://w3.ibm.com/standards/terminology
Terminology blog: http://blogs.tap.ibm.com/weblogs/page/kara@ca.ibm.com


                                                                           
             Erik Hennum                                                   
             <ehennum@us.ibm.c                                             
             om>                                                        To 
                                       "Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com>    
             10/12/2007 06:11                                           cc 
             PM                        dita@lists.oasis-open.org           
                                                                   Subject 
                                       RE: [dita] Groups - Issue #12038 -  
                                       Proposal: Acronyms and other        
                                       Abbreviated Forms                   
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




Hi, Gershon:

The proposal reflects a lot of insight into abbreviated terms, The
following statement, however, raises a concern about the representation for
abbreviated terms:
      Although there are similarities between abbreviated forms and
      glossary terms from the localization and presentation points of view,
      abbreviated forms are a special case.



If abbreviated term are a special case of glossary term, that argues
strongly that abbreviated terms should be modeled as special glossary
terms. Some of the benefits of a unified approach:
      Ease of use for DITA adopters, who learn one approach for
      representing terminology instead of two divergent approaches.
      Single implementation for processing common to glossary terms and
      abbreviated forms (which often results in higher function and
      quality).

For example, if an abbreviated term is represented as a glossary term, a
process that collates glossary terms will include the abbreviated terms in
the collation. Otherwise, the process either has to be written to collate
two kinds of elements or to preprocess the abbreviated terms into glossary
terms.

Also, if I understand correctly, the proposal envisions authoring the
definition of the expanded term at the first occurence of the term.
Depending on topic reuse, any content topic might or might not be included
in the information set. Thus, in a topic architecture, reuse of overlapping
subsets of terms might be easier if the term expansions were provided
separately from the content.

If we _could_ unify the representation of abbreviated and glossary terms
and still meet the requirements articulated by the proposal for abbreviated
terms, that would seem to be a stronger solution. Would it be appropriate
to do a gap analysis on the abbrevated term proposal and the approved
glossary proposal to see whether unification would be feasible?
      http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/26130/IssueGlossary12026.html

Finally, while conref (or conkeyref if the key reference proposal is
approved) might be the only way to meet the requirement for supplying
expanded terms in the short run, I'd note that the deferred proposal for
implicit linking has the potential to remove some of the authoring burden
for associating mentions with definitions in the long run:
      http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/15122/IssueNumber43.html


Hoping that's useful,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com


"Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com> wrote on 12/09/2007 10:32:14 AM:

>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: gljoseph@yahoo.com [mailto:gljoseph@yahoo.com]
> > Subject: [dita] Groups - Issue #12038 - Proposal: Acronyms
> >
> >
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/26361/IssueNumbe12038.html

>
>  The first time an abbreviated form is encountered,
>  the processing tool should use the text in the
>  <surface-form> element. Subsequent instances should
>  be replaced by the contents of the <short> element.
>
> How do you define first time?