RE: Comments on the metamodel slide deck

These are good questions. The PPT served its purpose for communication in the meeting where it was presented, but would communicate to a broader audience as a narrative document.

I also feel like we may need to separate the discussion semantic and structural metamodels. Aggregated business documents would be a component of the latter.

Metadata is interesting. At a high level of abstraction, would we say that business documents outside of technical publications have differences in their requirements that can be expressed in a metamodel? My impression is that by its nature, metadata provides a very broad degree of latitude and business units across an enterprise would have similar issues to the technical publications department when trying to reconcile the DITA metadata implementation with their own requirements.

Let’s discuss the approach to a “Background 2.0” and metamodel document(s) in this thread or at the next meeting...

Michael

From: Bruce Nevin (bnevin) [mailto:bnevin@cisco.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 12:46 PM
To: dita-busdocs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita-busdocs] Comments on the metamodel slide deck

I've reviewed the metamodel slide deck. The main issue I have with it is that slides are not a narrative to be read. They merely give visual emphasis to the actual narrative that you speak. There's a reason they're called bullets (aside from the resemblance to bullet holes). Bang! Bang! Bang! They're like brief notes that the listener might jot down as reminders of your main points. The content must be terse and well spaced. Wall to wall gray matter boggles the eye and puts the viewer to sleep--and tempts you to read every word, the cardinal sin of powerpoint. I've done a rewrite just to demonstrate what I mean (attached). In some cases I split a slide in two. I'm sure you can do a better job of it than I.

Do we want an overview TOC up front? Give folks an idea where we're going? Judging from the slides with just a title and no conntent, the sections seem to be:

Introduction
Is this the best title? I added some bullets as a kind of TOC for this section.

Enterprise Content Management
Slides 17 through 21. This section would benefit from a couple of examples of the tremendous redundancy that we saw in that other slide deck. Can we use some of those slides?

Modeling Enterprise Content
The bulk of the slides. These are laid out well, terse and very readable, and the repeated common structure helps. For slide 27, I made a graphic so I could change the font color for legibility (black and blue not good for eyes). For slides 57-62, I've added thumbnail excerpts from the "abstract types" slide image, one for each abstract type, to recapitulate the vertical relationships. I didn't include topic at the top, I could redo them if desired, but there is a stub vertical line ascending, maybe that's enough as a talking point.

Business Content Specializations
Need some content here.

Aggregated Business Documents
Does this belong in a presentation about the metamodel, or is that a separate slide deck?

Metadata Requirements
Just lists 5 categories of metadata. Is there more to say?

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