relationship table for reuse of a procedure

["Esrig, Bruce (Bruce)" <esrig@lucent.com>]

During Briefing #2b, Michael Priestly introduced relationship tables.

These are a mechanism for specifying related information,
in which a row specifies information that is related.
The columns are user-defined groupings of information.
Each cell contains one or more topicref's.

The meaning of a row of entries is as follows:
Each item in a cell is
related to all items in each of the *other* cells of the row.
By default, in the generated output, each topic will contain
a link to each other topic that it is related to, and vice versa.
It is possible to specify, for a topicref, that its participation
will be sourceonly or targetonly.
In a reltable, this could be done for an entire column, which
would mean that the effect would apply to every topicref
in the column.

I wanted to know how a technique we had used
to share a procedure across a number of instances
would look in the relationship table formalism.

I proposed an example similar to the following.

A column of concepts, such as "Cable list".

A column containing one procedure "How to connect a cable".
This refers to only to "Cable list" and "Cable routes".

A column containing three data topics: "Connections for cable 1",
"Connections for cable 2", "Connections for cable 3".
These are sourceonly.

The result would be that from the data topics, it would be
possible to reach the procedure and the concepts.