RE: [dita] Groups - DITA TC Minutes: May 24, 2011 (TCMinutes_05-24-2011.txt) uploaded

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

This was my action:

> Bruce Nevin: Research the status of Rob Hanna's proposal about
abstract 
>              base classes and figure out to get it in front of the TC 
>              for review and constructive guidance. 

Our last direction on the BusDocs Subcommittee was to use the SC as a
sort of incubator for these issues before presenting them to the TC. Don
volunteered to participate, and indeed attended several meetings, with
very productive effect. One outcome was Don's commitment to make
explicit the metamodel that is implicit in DITA. When with the help of
Michael Priestley and others he had written this up, we could more
clearly see the relationship between that and the metamodel that Rob has
developed over the past decade. Don has begged off continuing as TC
liaison to the SC, but is continuing to work on that project.

There's been a concern that if Rob gave his entire proposal to the TC,
it might be rejected out of hand as adding to complexity. I've reassured
him that that's a matter of perceived complexity, which we on the SC are
clear will only get worse as DITA is adopted in use contexts with
requirements that diverge from our familiar tech doc haunts, a problem
which this metamodel work aims to address.

Equally important, a metamodel informs content management--as indeed the
implicit metamodel of DITA informs CM now--and Rob's discussion of
traceability and the facilitating of business processes is a neglected
dimension of CM that is a vital key for adoption and use of DITA across
the enterprise and in government.

But the scope of a comprehensive metamodel makes it inherently difficult
to grasp in a presentation, and likewise challenging to present. This
rightly remains a source of reservations about bringing it to the TC.
Yet some sort of presentation seems to be a necessary first step to the
TC providing oversight in the way that Michael has suggested.

Lately, Rob has been working with Gershon to develop a troubleshooting
type in two stages of specialization. The first step is a more
generalized Governance type from which a family of related types can be
specialized. The troubleshooting type that Tim Grantham had been working
on is reassuringly similar to the specializations developed some years
ago by IBM, with some significant enhancements which I won't detail
here. When their work is a bit further along, that could be a compact
way to introduce the matter. 

With Rob's permission, I propose this as our next step.

Parenthetically, I now have a more complete explanation for my fuzzy
memory as to whether or not Rob had presented to the TC. First, I was on
an airplane and not attending; second, his presentation (which I did
remember but couldn't place) was to the Tech Comm SC, not to the full
TC. Whence, presumably, Gershon's engagement with Rob.

	/B