RE: [emergency] Naming Conventions

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Title: RE: [emergency] Naming Conventions

Yes.  As one of the contributors to some of the DoD standards

for SGML, I know what it is to be both victim and perp.

 

One survivor of all of that despite the web and HTML is the

US Army IADS system.  It used concepts that were all

eventually rolled up into XML and was doing so by 1990.

That is, it enabled a DTD but did not mandate one, instead,

relying on a user-configurable stylesheet system that mapped

the rendering to the tags.  It is still in use and being improved. 

Even earlier, the US Navy CASS ATI system based over the now 

defunct Mentor Context editor worked by enabling the authors to

create tag/rendering libraries and scripting the workflow through

the GUI.  The end product was then indexed and bitmap rendered. 

Old fashioned but of its day and successful.   Both of these succeeded

because the user was considered to be intelligent and able

to analyze their local requirements and apply them given

reasonable tools. 

 

CASS was 'of it's day';  IADS was ahead

of its time but is still out there doing useful work.  In both

cases, heavy participation by the user community was

instrumental.   And in both cases, many pre-existing

standards were blithely ignored because the standards

did not meet mission requirements.  Choose well and

wisely.  In this day, choose something that will blend

well and make sense to a public safety vendor consultant

working an RFP out with a local agency.  Only that will

get the attention of industry because only that comes

with $ attached.

 

Still, optional encodings and vocabularies have value.  It

enables those who need guidance to work from a reasonable

and not abstract model.   That is faster than requiring them

to learn and experiment with rules.  Both are needed in

this time, I think.

 

len

-----Original Message-----
From: John Silva [mailto:jc-silva-md@worldnet.att.net]
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 2:45 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); 'Rex Brooks'
Cc: emergency@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [emergency] Naming Conventions

Another path through this mess is what CDISC has done.  The FDA published a set of rules for submitting drug information electronically so a pharma could get its hot drug approved.  CDISC [clinical data information standard consortium] was formed from vendors, pharma companies and others to jointly develop an implementation standard using xml.  They have defined the tree structure with controlled names.  NCI used common data elements (CDEs that I spoke about) to handle the data element meta data, the instances of data within a specific node of the tree.  The fact that there were real world objects [forms and data on them] enabled this project to move forward pretty quickly.  I have been involved in too many data element definition project for DOD in the past that tried to do it all and failed miserably because real world apps and their users were not involved.

 

John