RE: [dita] Groups - Issue #12038 - Proposal: Acronyms and other AbbreviatedForms

[Erik Hennum <ehennum@us.ibm.com>]

Hi, Gershon:

The proposal reflects a lot of insight into abbreviated terms, The following statement, however, raises a concern about the representation for abbreviated terms:

Although there are similarities between abbreviated forms and glossary terms from the localization and presentation points of view, abbreviated forms are a special case.

If abbreviated term are a special case of glossary term, that argues strongly that abbreviated terms should be modeled as special glossary terms.  Some of the benefits of a unified approach:

• Ease of use for DITA adopters, who learn one approach for representing terminology instead of two divergent approaches.
• Single implementation for processing common to glossary terms and abbreviated forms (which often results in higher function and quality).

For example, if an abbreviated term is represented as a glossary term, a process that collates glossary terms will include the abbreviated terms in the collation.  Otherwise, the process either has to be written to collate two kinds of elements or to preprocess the abbreviated terms into glossary terms. 

Also, if I understand correctly, the proposal envisions authoring the definition of the expanded term at the first occurence of the term.  Depending on topic reuse, any content topic might or might not be included in the information set.  Thus, in a topic architecture, reuse of overlapping subsets of terms might be easier if the term expansions were provided separately from the content. 

If we _could_ unify the representation of abbreviated and glossary terms and still meet the requirements articulated by the proposal for abbreviated terms, that would seem to be a stronger solution.  Would it be appropriate to do a gap analysis on the abbrevated term proposal and the approved glossary proposal to see whether unification would be feasible?

http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/26130/IssueGlossary12026.html

Finally, while conref (or conkeyref if the key reference proposal is approved) might be the only way to meet the requirement for supplying expanded terms in the short run, I'd note that the deferred proposal for implicit linking has the potential to remove some of the authoring burden for associating mentions with definitions in the long run:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/15122/IssueNumber43.html

Hoping that's useful,


Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com


"Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com> wrote on 12/09/2007 10:32:14 AM:

>  
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: gljoseph@yahoo.com [mailto:gljoseph@yahoo.com] 
> > Subject: [dita] Groups - Issue #12038 - Proposal: Acronyms 
> >
> > http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/26361/IssueNumbe12038.html
> 
>  The first time an abbreviated form is encountered,
>  the processing tool should use the text in the
>  <surface-form> element. Subsequent instances should
>  be replaced by the contents of the <short> element.
> 
> How do you define first time?