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Subject: [ubl-csc] Format for Library Content Review


As promised in the LCSC meeting last week, I have been attempting
to figure out the document structure of the next Library Content
(and NDR) review.

We have what appear to be these two main requirements:

 - The document set has to be conformant (so far as it can be at
   this stage) with ISO guidelines.

 - The document has to be easy for us and our reviewers to work
   with.

A couple of days spent trying to construct a traditional document
conforming to ISO/IEC Directives, Part 3 (Rules for the structure
and drafting of International Standards) with additional reference
to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 N 505 (Swedish view on ISO/IEC 8859
document layout) have convinced me that this it is possible to
achieve both objectives, but not at the same time.

The biggest problem is the spreadsheets.

 - They contain hidden annotations that don't show up in a
   printout.  We will have to solve this editorially by breaking
   the annotations out into text that will precede the printed
   version of the spreadsheets.

 - They use colors in a semantically meaningful way.  This doesn't
   work so well on paper unless you have a color printer, which
   most people don't.  I don't have a good solution for this; I
   guess people using the printed version will just have to cope
   with the grayscale approximations.

 - They want to be displayed sideways on pages that use a separate
   framework for page numbering and TOC generation.  This can be
   accomplished by creating JPEG images of each spreadsheet page,
   rotating the images, and pasting them into the document, but
   the process is not easy and results in insanely large files.
   One obvious solution is to convert everything to PDF and use
   Acrobat to assemble the document, but I will need some time to
   explore Acrobat's capabilities with regard to headers, footers,
   and TOC generation.  I also believe (on general principles)
   that this problem can be solved by using the openoffice suite
   to convert everything to openoffice xml formats and working
   with those using emacs and perl scripts, but I will need some
   help from the openoffice team in figuring out how to do this.

So while I believe that it is possible to create a printed ISO/IEC
conformant document when we're all done and ready to move UBL into
the international standardization process, it's going to take some
further work to figure out how to do this, and it seems to me
unlikely that the solution we finally adopt is one that we and our
reviewers will find easy to work with during the design and review
phases.

Until we get to the place where we're ready to release UBL as a
Committee Specification, therefore, I suggest that we publish the
NDR and LC sets as hypertext documents that conform as closely as
possible to ISO/IEC document organization guidelines but are
published using HTML together with spreadsheet and drawing formats
that can be worked with using free tools.  The Excel spreadsheet
format qualifies under this heading because the equivalent program
from openoffice.org can work with it.

In conformance with the ISO/IEC naming guidelines, I suggest the
following official names for the pieces of this effort:

   Universal Business Language -- Part 1. Naming and Design Rules
   Universal Business Language -- Part 2. Library Content
   Universal Business Language -- Part 3. Context Methodology

Mockups of website-resident and local versions of Part 2
(part2.htm and part2loc.htm, the latter in a zip file) are
attached below.  They are identical except that the
website-resident version points to specific URLs on the UBL LCSC
part of the site while the local version points to files bundled
with the document.  The URLs are fictional at this point, of
course.  I've used the XSD and XLS files from Gunther Stuhec's
LCSC message of 20 December to partially populate the local
version so that you can see how this works.  I've tried for
wording that enables the local version of the HTML file to be
generated from the website-specific version with a single global
search-and-replace on the site-specific part of the URLs.

We could use the same approach to include stylesheets and case
studies, but since we're not planning on releasing them
synchronously with the schemas in this review cycle, I haven't
bothered to include hooks for them in these mockups.

Please look this over and tell me whether you think it's heading
in the right direction.  It would also be helpful if someone
subscribed to the LCSC list could forward to the LCSC a URL to
this message in the CSC archive in time for the LCSC
conference call tomorrow (Monday 23 December).

Jon

Attachment: part2.htm
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Attachment: part2loc.zip
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