[Esip-preserve] A Further Suggestion to Rama and John Moses

[Bruce Barkstrom]

After recalling my experience with life on projects that developed
hardware, I think it might be useful to dig up the list of documents
that are contractually required for delivery to the government.  This
list might even be organized as a document tree, which would
probably simplify the categorization if we wanted to do an ontology.
Besides this use, we could use the list to identify key documents
that would be recommended - perhaps even with a set of documentation
levels that would help users understand how complete the project's
documentation is, e.g.
   - Fully documented: all recommended documents available
   - Partially documented: most recommended documents available
   - Sparsely documented: most recommended documents unavailable
   - Undocumented: few or no recommended documents available
I suppose this kind of documentation scale could also be helpful
in making accession decisions - even though this particular suggestion
only covers only hardware development project documentation, not
the data processing or algorithm development kind.

To set our expectations in this area, I don't think we'd reach a
consensus on how to categorize this kind of list at the meeting,
but it would probably be helpful to have it mentioned and to have
a brief discussion of what we might try to do with it as future
work.  I'll also rummage around in my basement to see if I've
kept any of this kind of project documentation from the firm that
used to be called TRW.  As a further note, any large project that
develops hardware will have enough documentation that it will have
its own, proprietary cataloging system (with identifications equivalent
to the Library of Congress catalog numbers and a document tree
that has an equivalent to the LoC classification system).

Bruce B.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.lists.esipfed.org/pipermail/esip-preserve/attachments/20101212/044424bf/attachment.html>