Re: [dita] Genericode Standard for Formally Defining Enumerated Values?

[Erik Hennum <ehennum@us.ibm.com>]

Hi, Eliot:

Thanks for mentioning this work. I'd seen the UBL code lists previously but wasn't aware that it had been spun off as the Genericode initiative. I can easily see taking advantage of Genericode if good infrastructure comes into being around it.

I wouldn't think, however, that we'd want to drop the controlled values proposal from DITA 1.2 for several reasons:

• Genericode is relational -- the XML equivalent of a database table. It represents the properties for each thing in a flat list.
• The DITA controlled values proposal is hierarchical and associative -- it has a primary purpose of representing the subjects covered by the content we create for use in filtering, flagging, and retrieval. It makes sense to share and exchange the definitions of such subjects with the content.
• Controlled values and controlled vocabulary have a natural representation with topics and their links. (Indeed, Wikipedia has been processed as one enormous web of controlled values.) It would be hobbling the potential of DITA not to take advantage of that capability of topics and maps.
• We would benefit from having a single method for specifying enumerations whether selection values, pedagogy types in learning, and so on.

I don't think that's antagonistic to Genericode -- if we can validate an attribute enumeration by flattening a DITA scheme to a Genericode list and then using Genericode-aware Schema validators or a Genericode Schematron generator, we should leverage those tools for those environments -- but we have good reasons for having a DITA method for representing controlled values and vocabularies. 


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com


Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com> wrote on 12/12/2007 01:59:32 PM:

> While I think the controlled values proposal will be very useful and may 
> be appropriate for also defining the effective values for unconstrained 
> enumerated attributes, I think we should also look at the OASIS 
> Genericode standard as well, as it may be more appropriate for this 
> particular use or may be something that can work with the controlled 
> values proposal in a useful way. See http://www.genericode.org/
> 
>  From what I've seen, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward 
> for editing tools, for example, to integrate support for 
> genericode-defined value sets into a DITA-specific authoring environment 
> given a little bit of configuration (e.g., for this 
> shell/specialization, use this code set definition for this 
> type/attribute pair).