Implications of Subcomponents of lcBase Not Being Topics

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

I'm starting a project with a publisher of test prep books. These 
consist of practice tests and lessons with most of the content being 
individual questions.

One chief business goal is to be able to have a database of individual 
questions that can then be used directly or by tracked copy into 
different publications. For example, each U.S. state may have its own 
version of the 8th Grade Language Arts test prep where the questions are 
essentially same across all the states but other content is state 
specific. Or the same question may be applicable to several different 
grade levels.

I would like to make the XML application we develop for this client at 
least DITA compatible if not directly DITA based.

To that end I've pulled down the March 8 learning SC plugin and I'm 
looking at it.

I had the possibly naive expectation that each question would be a topic 
but I see that questions are subelements within a specialization of 
section.

The immediate challenge I see is that if questions are not topics in 
their own right there is no good DITA-conforming way to manage 
individual questions as individual storage objects--they have to be 
stored within a topic even if the intent is to use conref to get them.

This suggests that in my case the only solution would be to create a 
topic type whose only purpose is to hold a single question. That doesn't 
seem like a necessarily bad thing, if for no other reason than that it 
provides a way to bind a title and specialized metadata to the question.

The counter question is "if questions were topics what would their 
titles be?" I suspect the SC has already chewed on that question. The 
only answers I could come up with were "The question statement is the 
title" and "something descriptive of the learning objective the question 
assesses, e.g. "Multiply two two-digit numbers" or "Identify the subject 
and object of a sentence".

Has anyone else thought about the question-level re-use use case where 
each question should be (or may need to be) managed independently of all 
other questions?

Cheers,

Eliot

-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 610.631.6770
www.reallysi.com
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