S1000D Issue 4.2 – What’s to come

S1000D User Forum 2016 – Day 1

As Tammy commented in her blog last week, we safely completed our four flights and 30 hours of travel to arrive back in Brisbane, with luggage this time!

On the Tuesday at the forum, Paul Haslam briefed delegates on the upcoming ASD S1000D 4.2 release. While the information is still fresh in my mind, I wanted to highlight the key points I took from the briefing:

1. Applic Data Typing – this provided guidelines on how applicability should be displayed in the Identification and Status Block
2. BRDoc – this is a new Schema for the creation of Business Rules Decisions for the project. Validation of the content is based on the BREX and Business Rules information.
3. Graphics – support for 3D graphics. Chapter 3.9.2.4 (Illustration rules and multimedia) has been totally re-written
4. ICN Metadata – this is a new Schema for supporting graphics metadata information. This follows the traditional Data Module structure but is specifically designed for graphics.
5. IPD – this schema has added operations restriction information
6. Layout – additional rules for the layout of content in the delivery
7. Learning – additional SCORM runtime functionality
8. Maintenance Task Data – the schedule schema now support preliminary requirements
9. Reason for Update – support added for references
10. Security – this has been broken down into:
    1. Security added to the DM Title
    2. New attribute (derivative classification) – this allows for the full history of classification changes. The attribute can be set in the Identification and Status and referenced in the content.
11. Service Bulletins – a new attribute has been added to the schema, but we will have to wait until the release to get more information
12. General Clean up in the specification – to ensure that there is consistency of information. This was mainly over the Mandatory/Optional/Conditional elements/attributes

The most important information is when the new version of the specification will be released. We have been told that the scheduled date is 31 December 2016. Issue 4.2 is also expected to be the last of the 4 series, but they may issue a 4.3 depending on what is in the 140 Change Requests that the working group have received. If the Change Requests received are not vital, they will be held and included in Issue 5. Issue 5 is scheduled to be released 2 years after v4.2 (2018/2019), with all future releases continuing in a two year cycle. For those who are interested, Issue 5 will be the first time that the Specification will be generated as XML files instead of Word documents.

The OneStrand Team are looking forward to getting our hands on Issue 4.2 so that we can start implementing the new features and functions into the R4i Product Suite.

Reeta Nye