Two excellent XRI requirements illustrations from OASIS

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@onename.com>]

XRI List Members:
 
I could not resist forwarding this message to the ad-hoc OASIS Document
Management list because the first two of the three requirements it lists
for OASIS document management have direct corallaries in the XRI
requirements document. In particular, #1 below is an excellent
articulation of the need for semantic mapping of human-friendly
identifiers to persistent, machine-friendly identifiers, which is one of
the key advantages that OASIS XRIs would add over OASIS URNs. 
 
=Drummond 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Winters, Roger [mailto:Roger.Winters@METROKC.GOV]
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 9:09 AM
To: 'doc-mgmt@lists.oasis-open.org'
Cc: 'John Greacen'; 'Robin_Gibson@osca.state.mo.us'; 'Dr. Laurence Leff'
Subject: [doc-mgmt] RE: [chairs] need input for doc mgmt requirements
 
Dear Mr. Best: 
I want to offer a few suggestions about requirements for document
management for OASIS committees. Be advised that, though I am in a
secretarial role for the Legal XML Electronic Court Filing Technical
Committee, I am not yet fully conversant with those duties and powers.
It is as Editor for the TC that I offer these thoughts. I hope you'll
forgive me if some of these suggestions ask you, due to my ignorance, to
do things that you have already handled within OASIS. 
1.      Naming 
Although OASIS has adopted well-developed naming conventions for
documents proceeding through its processes, there are a number of
instances where a working group needs to share and process files of
various kinds, many of which would not themselves become drafts of
committee specifications. It would be helpful if, regardless of the
filenames given to documents, there were a way to enter a descriptive
title that would be shown on the appropriate Web page, to serve as a
clickable link to the file. This seems advisable because few of the
members are likely to learn the naming conventions because, even though
they have a rational and well-defined basis, they look complicated. Once
a file gets to a certain point in the OASIS process, e.g., when it
becomes appropriate for the Editor to take charge of it as a draft
committee specification, the formalities of the naming conventions
should be followed carefully. Even then, assigned easy-to-understand
titles would be preferable to titles that reflect either the filename or
the first few words in the document.
2.      Document Version Management 
This is, of course, a basic requirement for document management systems,
along with having check-in/check-out read/write privileges and controls.
It is also helpful to provide guidance, perhaps in a "Document
Management Help Page," on what might warrant preserving a current
version and issuing a new number to its changed version. I think such
version control is likely to be a useful and important tool even at the
subcommittee level; that is where participants are more likely to need
guidance in finding a balance between meaningful versioning and needless
proliferation of files. Tools to manage document ownership and
check-in/check-out functionality need to be easy to understand and not
too difficult to implement. For example, a term limited subcommittee
chair might need only a few simple tools that can be quickly and easily
mastered.
3.      Document Disposition 
Although I am involved with records management, I am not an expert. This
is an area where OASIS might want to engage records and information
management experts to help design records retention and disposition
policies, procedures, and tools. It is important to resist the
temptation to "save everything because storage is cheap," because there
are other issues and costs besides storage involved in records
management. A records retention schedule is advisable, with a
disposition strategy that ensures that records scheduled to be disposed
of are in fact eliminated.
I'm glad to participate in future discussion of these matters. 
Regards, 
Roger 
Roger Winters 
Electronic Court Records Manager 
King County 
Department of Judicial Administration 
516 Third Avenue, E-609 MS: KCC-JA-0609 
Seattle, Washington 98104 
V: (206) 296-7838 F: (206) 296-0906 
roger.winters@metrokc.gov