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.