The Technical Committee met in Minneapolis, MN 1-5 August 2022. The focus of this meeting was finalizing the work needed to move Lifecycle to the COGS production platform. The COGS production platform, currently used by SDTL, captures the content of Lifecycle in a set of CSV files and related documentation text which is then transformed into multiple implementation languages (XML, RDF, JSON, UML/XMI, C++, etc.) and a documentation file in Sphinx. The primary goal is to provide a platform that supports intermittent testing, greater access for developers, and generated documentation and implementation structures. This will move Lifecycle out of being a hand-crafted structure. In a series of sessions, the members also discussed the focus of the Technical Committee over the next few years given the role of the new Scientific Board and the diversification of the DDI product line. An executive summary of the meeting is included on this page as well as links to related documents:

Executive Meeting Summary

Attendees

Wendy Thomas, Jon Johnson, Ingo Barkow, Oliver Hopt, Darren Bell, Dan Smith, Jeremy Iverson, Flavio Rizzolo (remote), and George Alter (remote)

DDI Lifecycle in COGS

This is a follow-up on the work done in the virtual meeting in April 2022 which addressed issues related to the input of the XML Schema for DDI Lifecycle 3.2. The bugs were generally attributable to structural inconsistencies introduced in years of hand-crafting the XML Schemas. There were also issues related to moving from a heavily nested structure to a serialized structure. We are flattening the structure, changing from inline inclusion to inclusion by reference, and removing XML centric structures such as CHOICE. In addition, the physical structures as currently written, result in duplication of element names with different structures depending on the namespace (example: dataItem in m1, m2, and m3 namespaces). The review taking place during this meeting was intended to identify and resolve any remaining issues. It also is intended to identify those issues that will require remodeling to fully resolve. These issues are outside of the goal of version 4.0 which is intended to take 3.3 content and convert it to a serialized structure.

We resolved a set of XML Edit issues (14), Bugs (6), and special case/hard coded cases (16) were checked and verified. We identified 11 schema changes to be made in COGS and completed 4 of these. A total of 9 issues were filed and completed regarding the COGS repository and 3 future issues for DDI Lifecycle were identified and filed.

The group reviewed the COGS generated documentation including a review of the Topic categories and the presentation of content. Suggestions were made regarding Topic categories and how items were distributed within each (allow for listing in multiple topics and provide an option for an alphabetical listing of all items). Changes in the page content for the use of items (example: Agent used by Citation/Creator/Agent) allowing for increased path depth and changes in the content of the image of an item and its relationships. Discussed the integration of former high level document content into the Sphinx documentation, retaining Best Practices materials as official documents external to the product package. The materials in the product package should be stable.

Technical Committee role and activities

The recent reorganization of the Scientific Board, the growth in the number of work products of the Alliance and the need for a succession plan for TC officers prompted a preliminary discussion on the focus of the TC and the way it could function effectively in the medium to long term. Associated with this is the desire to have a more consistent way of working and communicating across the active work products so that the TC has a better technical overview of the growing suite of products.

The discussion took place in two sessions, a background session to look at the broader environment of the Technical Committee followed by a session discussing specific actions the Technical Committee can take and the focus of the committee over the next year.