HISC Teleconference - 2005-01-11

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

An HISC committee teleconference was convened 2005-01-11 20:30EST and the 
only attendees were Ken and Micah.  Mark informed us ahead of time that he 
would not be able to attend.

We had a brief discussion of Examplotron.  Specifying field order is 
already part of forms technologies, but specifying groups of fields is 
under the control of host language e.g. SVG, XHTML, etc.

We had a brief discussion of output forms specifications:

(1) Question of what maps where?  The mappings dictate what fields of the 
form are found in a UBL instance.  If there is information in the UBL 
instance that does not have a home in the UN Layout Key, the information is 
not exposed.
(2) Question of calculations? There are no calculations done in the output 
forms.  All of the information already exists in the instance and was 
generated somehow by the instance-creating application ... application 
delivers all fields to stylesheet for presentation using the instance ... 
the stylesheet does not do any calculations.

Brief discussion of the question of the role of calculation in forms input:
  - does the form do any calculations or just deliver fields to application 
to do calculations?
  - an input specification could express that a given field is the 
calculation of other fields, but the act of doing the calculation could be 
implemented either in the forms processor or in the application, at the 
choice of the implementer

We outlined a candidate game plan:
  - create guidelines for the writing of the input specifications
    - objective: a forms implementer has enough information from the 
specification that they don't need to know the semantics of UBL, they can 
effectively create a UBL instance solely by following the specification 
(this was the success of the output specifications)
  - include a glossary of forms terminology
  - include prototypical examples of input field specifications so that 
specification writers on the committee can follow the examples when 
contributing to the writing of the input specifications
  - the committee agrees on the guidelines document

We discussed how much of UBL to implement?
  - implement UBL Lite (as best as defined at the time) in a spec
    - latest http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl-dev/200409/msg00002.html
  - decided not to limit ourselves to the UN Layout Key

We discussed how the input specifications could be programmatically exploited:
  - Ken outlined the publishing process for the output specifications 
relied on DocBook for writing the prose and abstract new XML constructs in 
a committee vocabulary for capturing the XPath information semantically 
embedded in the DocBook
  - committee vocabulary used to describe the semantics of each field per 
committee guidelines
  - a preprocessing stylesheet creates pure DocBook for purpose of 
publishing (committee semantics become DocBook constructs)
  - other processing of specification sources can then harvest directly 
from committee semantics and produce semantic output for other forms systems

Action items:
  - Ken will send to Micah the DocBook+HISC stylesheets for output 
specifications as an example of what was done
  - Micah volunteered to write the guidelines
  - when complete the committee will divvy up who writes which specifications
  - Ken will generate XPaths for UBL Lite for use in actual specifications

We ended the meeting after 50 minutes, feeling like we got a lot accomplished.

........................ Ke

--
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