Business Rule Decision Points

The S1000D specification includes a set of Business Rule Decision Points (BRDP). In S1000D issue 4.1 there are over 550 individual BRDP. These decision points are there to help implementers to make important decisions about their project before starting the implementation. Not all decision points are relevant to all projects, so the first step should be to review all the points and select the ones that apply. Some of the decisions to be made will be simple, such as which language to use, and some will require consideration at a broader business level because the decisions made for one project may have an impact on other projects at a later date, for example the model identification code to be used.

For the Knowledge Warehouse project, a proper review of the BRDP was not done prior to the implementation for the reasons mentioned earlier, although many of the decisions still had to be made. With the benefit of hindsight, a proper BRDP review would’ve been beneficial and prevented some inconsistencies that had to be rectified later. For example there was confusion about whether the country code of modules should be UK or GB and both codes were used in documents. In fact only GB is an ISO valid identifier and formalising this decision in advance would’ve prevented the wrong code being used and having to be corrected later.

It should be acknowledged however that for those unfamiliar with S1000D, the purpose of a particular BRDP may not become clear until the project is well under way. Therefore only a baseline review of BRDP may be possible initially with further reviews later to understand if rules have become relevant. For the Knowledge Warehouse project, the following BRDP were very important and could probably be considered baseline requirements for any S1000D implementation. Appendix A contains further decision points that were also important for Knowledge Warehouse as well as some that were not considered but which, with the benefit of hindsight, probably should have been.

Table 10. Baseline BRDP for the Knowledge Warehouse project

IdentifierTitle
BRDP-S1-00002List of permitted CAGE codes and/or names of the originator companies to be used for the technical publications
BRDP-S1-00003Issue of S1000D to be used
BRDP-S1-00005Publications to be produced
BRDP-S1-00006Schemas to be used
BRDP-S1-00047Country and language codes
BRDP-S1-00050Source of the technical names
BRDP-S1-00070Use of the element <enterpriseName> and/or the attribute enterpriseCode for the responsible partner company
BRDP-S1-00071Use of the element <enterpriseName> and/or the attribute enterpriseCode for the responsible originator
BRDP-S1-00106Population of the element <refs>
BRDP-S1-00332Allocation of Product model identification code
BRDP-S1-00334Allocation of system difference code
BRDP-S1-00336Product SNS structure
BRDP-S1-00338Number of characters in assembly code
BRDP-S1-00344Use of CAGE code and/or model identification code based ICN
BRDP-S1-00366Use of a project specific BREX data module
BRDP-S1-00368Applicable sets of business rules