RE: [emergency] Naming Conventions

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:]
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 
  2:45 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); 'Rex Brooks'
Cc: 
  
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