Minutes of 20 November meeting

[Anne Hendry <anne.hendry@sun.com>]

The Tools and Techniques Subcommittee met on 20 November 16:00 UTC.
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2003&mon=11&day=20&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&pl=224

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TTSC Charter:
   To evaluate and recommend to the UBL TC the tools and techniques
   to be used in the development, quality assurance, documentation,
   maintenance, and revision of the UBL XML data formats, and write
   and maintain guidelines reflecting these recommendations.


Agenda:

1. Welcome from Co-Chairs and appointment of Secretary to take minutes.
2. Review of Agenda
3. Tools Requirements (see below)
4. Review of Tools paper (Gunther will send to list)
5. Schedule
6. Other Business
7. Next Meeting


1. Welcome from Co-Chairs, Attendance, and appointment of Secretary to 
take minutes.

   Meeting participants (Y = present)

   Voting Members:  

      Chee-Kai Chin     -
      Paul Thorpe       -
      Ray Seddigh       -
      Gunther Stuhec    -
      Eduardo Gutentag  -
      Dave Carlson      -
      Anne Hendry       Y
      Lisa Seaburg      Y
      Chris Nelson      Y
      Tony Coates       Y

   Observers:

      Jon Bosak         -
      Robert Glushko    -
      Tim McGrath       -
   
   There is not a quorum present.

   Anne will take minutes.

2. Review of Agenda

   Approved.

3. Tools Requirements (see below)

   There are two sets of tools to consider:
   those for internal development of UBL and tools for exteral users of UBL.
   There is some overlap, but for the most part we are now focusing on
   tools for the end user/developer of UBL.

   We need to define that requisite set of features we want in any tool.
   This is more of an end-user set of requirements rather than technical
   requirements that are outlined below.  To get the discussion going
   during the coming week Chris will send a first-pass set of features
   to the list.

   We need to identify what it is we will produce by February - the 
structure
   of what we want to communicate about tools and their use in UBL.  
This will
   tie in to the input received from implementors through PISC.  Through 
PISC
   we can get a better idea of the real-world business requirements for 
tools.

   It would be useful to show a cooperative tools environment - how users
   can put together existing tools and technologies to develop with UBL.
   Something to provide a guideline for developers and gives them some
   idea of what directions we think tools will go.  To get a better idea
   of what each tool does we can review one or two per meeting.  Anne
   will send out information supplied by Micheal Dill for the GEFEG tool,
   as a start.

   Compliance checking (ndr rules, etc) is a big issue.  For this we need
   an architecture for the rules - a document that paints the big picture
   for rules and puts things in perspective.  Right now this appears to
   be a grab bag - doesn't show best practices, overall architecture, etc.

   Lisa will send Tony the full NDR docuemnt that descrives the architecture
   and best practices.  All the rules came out of different position papers
   and are being synthesized in ndr with 'guiding principles' documented.
   Tony will review and provide feedback.

   We need a document that describes the current process - how you can
   change a spreadsheet/model and use ublish to create new schemas and
   be close to ccts compliance.  Is this doable with out incurring any
   additional cost?  This description is needed from the modeling side
   - to show how you can use uml to create the schemas.  The problem
   is that there is no way from the UML at the moment to know that
   the BIEs being used are already in existence.  There is no tool
   at the moment that can do this.  So quite a bit of the development
   would be manual.

   It would be helpful to have documentation on each of the tools - how
   to use them in the context of UBL.  Anne will follow up to get written
   documenation on how to use tool as related to deveopment of UBL.
   We need to decide on a structure for this documentation, to provide
   some consistency bewtween tools and enusre the information is
   valuable to a UBL user (eg. how to use these tools for ubl).


4. Review of Tools paper (Gunther will send to list)

   Deferred.

5. Schedule

   Deferred.
   
6. Other Business

   None.

7. Next Meeting

   Next Thursday, same time.
   Caveat - this is Thanksgiving in the US, so it may be a small meeting.
   Anne will send out mail asking about future meetings on Christmas and
   New Years, which both fall on a Thursday.


Action Items
------------
20031120-01: Chris create first pass at feature set and send to list for 
discussion.
20031120-02: Anne review tools documentation.
20031120-03: Anne send out information on GEFEG tool.