J2008 DTD Committee Meeting

By Dianne Kennedy. SGML Resource Center, Elmhurst, Illinois, USA. Email: dken@mcs.com

SAE J2008 is a family of standards developed by the membership of the Society of Automotive Engineers in response to the mandate of the Clean Air Act to partition and provide easy access to emission-related automotive service information. At the heart of this SGML standard is a relational Data Model for Automotive Service Information rather than any particular document model. The SGML definition set forth within J2008 provides a hierarchical representation of the Data Model. In addition, this standard provides models for common text constructs such as tables, paragraph, lists, and procedures which are found within automotive service information.

SAE J2008 was balloted as a Draft SAE Standard Q1 1995. The ballot passed and the industry is currently awaiting publication by SAE. This type of standard is new to SAE. Not only is J2008 a living, evolving standard, but it is a digital standard. SAE is currently struggling to define a delivery and update mechanism as well as to determine an appropriate pricing structure. It is important to note that the J2008 DTD, unlike most industry DTDs, is copyrighted and cannot be freely distributed.

SAE J2008 is now under going a number of changes. First are changes which are being requested by real users of the standard. Second are changes which result from the coordination with efforts in the trucking industry known as T2008.

Draft models to support all data model changes reviewed in the April 11 [1997] meeting were reviewed. The following list represents data model work yet to be completed and new questions raised by the DTD working group. Issues raised were:

What does "language" imply? Does it imply the delivery language? Or is it a switch to put at the J2008 level to indicate languages and language equivalents?
Platform and its use is questionable. Will attributes which match the data model at the vehicle level work (platformcode, platformdesc)?
Question of destination country versus marketing area.
How does the year above vehicle relate to year above paths 12-16?
What is the difference between country of manufacturer and country?
Why is market area connected to both market area and SIE.
Differences of requirements between trucks and cars (Profiles) How will this affect the DTD?

ICADD is the International Committee for Accessability in Document Design. ICADD makes available pre-defined attributes which can be added to DTDs to make the SGML data accessible in Braille and via voice synthesizer. The committee plan to add these attributes to J2008 to make it accessible in these ways.

A new profile of SGML to provide viewing for SGML data on the Web has been approved by the W3C committee. The DTD group will review its DTD writing style to assure that SAE J2008 data is immediately Web-ready without extra work by information providers.