Gaya, I spoke too soon.Now having checked out several more documents in the .zip file you forwarded, I see that the first five of them -- K050, L040, L060, L080 & L120 -- all list the Department of Public Safety as the organization issuing the report. That is also the case with the last of the 20 documents included in the file -- P330 -- so I assume it is true for all of them.That's not a killer issue but it does apparently mean that I'll need to manually correlate the file names with the organizations to which they apply. If that's true, it would be helpful to include the agency code (i.e., the file name) in the organization name element or perhaps in the organization identifier element to save me from having to manually keep track of it when I try to determine the name of the agency to which it applies.Indeed, since the agency codes are identifiers applied by the State of South Carolina, it might make sense to use them as the organization identifiers in the StratML renditions of the reports, perhaps by appending SCAgencyCode in front of the code, e.g., SCAgencyCodeK050.If that's easy to do, it might be worth trying. On the other hand, one potential downside is that it would not be considered a GUID or UUID.Owen Ambur
Mr. Ambur,
The South Carolina Department of Administration (Admin) received your Freedom of Information Act request December 1st , 2022.
Please see the attached document responsive to your request.
Thank you,
Sara
Sara Pincelli
Project Coordinator, Office of the Executive Director
The South Carolina Department of Administration
1200 Senate Street, Suite 460, Columbia, SC 29201
O: 803-896-9540 | C: 803-673-6718
Lead.Collaborate.Innovate.
From: Owen Ambur <owen....@verizon.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 1, 2022 11:50 AM
To: Quick, Elizabeth <beth....@admin.sc.gov>
Cc: gayaudeshani <gayaud...@gmail.com>
Subject: [External] SC Agency Names & Budget Codes
Beth, can you tell us where we can find a listing of the agency names associated with their budget codes?
We're aiming to automate the process of converting the relevant data in the Agency Accuntability Reports from Excel to StratML format.
I obtained your E-mail address at https://www.admin.sc.gov/admin_directory?service_area=2&division=0
In his role as chairman of the Legislative Oversight Committee, Weston Newton has expressed interest in seeing agency performance data rendered in more readily comprehensible format.
Owen Ambur
On Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 05:47:37 AM EST, gayaudeshani <gayaud...@gmail.com> wrote:
if we can find the names of the agencies associated with the agency codes, we can save it as a separated xml file and copy the necessary information automatically using XSLT.(matching information for the agency code)
I don't care whether it's called a forms-based interface or not. All I care about is making it as easy as possible for users to created and edit documents in valid StratML format. I wouldn't expect many people to take on the complexity and cost associated with using oXygen, but I'd like to think that SyncRoSoft might see commercial value in making a specialized instance of WebAuthor available for StratML at low cost. One of the biggest shorcomings of my (acually Joe Carmel's) XForms is the inability to expand and collapse sections in order to avoid a lot of scrolling to view/edit large documents. No doubt, there are other usability issues to be addressed for newbies, who unlike me, don't have 20 years of experience with StratML files.Regarding paragraphs, lists, and tables, the thought in the StratML standard is that paragraphs contained in the <Descriptor> elements should be relatively short and limited to one. Brevity is the soul of wit, and if more text is needed, a new element(s) should probably be added to the standard to accommodate the type(s) of information it conveys. (Likewise, the <OtherInformation> elements are a catch-all for content that users may wish to include that doesn't fit neatly on elements already specified in the schema.) In most cases, it is the authors who want more; most viewers want less, with the capability to see more (e.g., via links) if they wish. (I'm pretty sure I load most people down with more than they want, and I know that many people do that to me. The World Bank did a study and found that no one was reading their PDFs.)Likewise, if the content of bulleted lists is not already accomodated in the existing elements of the schema, such content may be a candidate for specification of a new element(s) of the standard. In my experience, such lists are often evidence of attempting to include sub-plans within plans, when it would be better to keep them separate and use the stratml:Relationship links to connect them.As far as tables are concerned, stylesheets can present <PerformanceIndicators>s in tabular format. See, for example, the StratML community's Performance Indicator 1.2.1: Plans Converted. Those tables can and are also presented in more visually attractive PDF, such as at https://stratml.us/turnkey/SMLC2021.pdf, but unlike the XML cannot be externally referenced. (I understand the PDF community is working on such capability.)
Kurt, I'm not happy with my local ISP. It took them a week to get my Internet access back.
I'll take a closer look at your comments tomorrow but would be happy to have a televideo conference with you if you'd like. We could meet at https://whereby.com/ambur
Owen Ambur
https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenambur/
On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 04:54:58 PM EST, Kurt Conrad <con...@sagebrushgroup.com> wrote:
Owen,
I'm puttin' it in print: I don't like public discussions with people that I don't know and haven't been introduced to. I have no clue who these people are and how to communicate with them. Whatever this is, it isn't an organization. It feels more religious. God, what are the shared values?
Anyway. There is important work to be done, and I will trust that my thoughts won't come back to haunt me...
Oh, and another thing, as we're ringing in newness. Owen, your emphasis on all communications being text-based is very expensive and limits the progress that I can make with the time and attention I can devote to these matters.
For example, I clicked on the links that you provided and found data bricks that camouflage whatever you wanted me to read. I didn't waste the time and was out in a couple of seconds.
I'm seriously thinking about writing a Balisage paper about the hazards of treating documents like data. Jean's getting included, because I got this idea from her.
Responses embedded below...
Thanks
/s/ kwc 2022.12.29 13:53
At 2022-12-28 17:48, Owen Ambur wrote:
Kurt, my experience with oXygen's forms-based interface for StratML is pretty dated and was fairly thin even back then.Good to clarify. This uses oXml forms controls, but I don't consider it to really be a forms interface. This, https://stratml.us/forms2/Part1Form.xml, I consider to be a forms interface.
It is documented at https://stratml.us/#Oxygen as well as in these notes in the StratML history at https://stratml.us/history.htm#2013:
- On October 29, 2013, George Bina provided a forms-based UI for StratML in oXygen.
And it really gets to what I think is a fundamental challenge when trying to tune oXml Author and WebAuthor to work with StratML:
You've built a data model, using a data modeling language, and when expressed as a form, it makes perfect sense. Could I quibble about some choices? Of course. But the form is perfectly usable. Even the ID blocks make sense.
xsd was developed by database folks to handle the xml expression of complex, often relational, schema. The language of choice for designing and maintaining document models was and still is sgml/xml dtd syntax. For one thing, it's a modeling language, so you can more easily read and understand more complex data structures, more info on the screen, more signal, less noise.
Also dtds differentiate the roles of elements and attributes, based on decades of lessons learned and best practice. The databasers smooshed them together. In documents, it is very rare that ids are visible, especially when they're machine-generated. My prodoc system has controls to make them visible and editable, but they're off by default.
Oh and another feature that speaks to the different performance targets: In documents, you don't want the validation rules for a structure to magically change. It limits reuse.
In my feeble brain, you've developed an interchange standard. Cool. Do you want to talk about an authoring standard?
I author and publish strategic plans. I was introduced to the government performance and results act in the early 90s and have incorporated many activity-based management and StratML concepts into my personal oXml doctype: prodoc.
But I would never author or publish a strategic plan for human consumption using StratML. Why? I believe that the sequencing reinforces bad, conflict-amplifying habits.
Also, the doctype doesn't allow me to acces the data structures that I expect when communicating complex material to humans: paragraphs, lists, and tables.
Back to the current oXml stylesheets. The form controls are used to add and remove structures. I recently worked with this feature in a production environment. Most of it got turned off.
Personally, I find it noisy and distracting. While data models are often hard to learn, most document models have been designed to both be learnable and easy to type. They reflect agreements around the natural languages used in a complex, multi-agent knowledge flows.
I find that these natural language considerations of often in data models. I consider most document markup to be semi-formalized. The tags are very explicit, but the containers (especially with regard to datatyping) are usually more flexible. And compared to the fully-formalized ontology-based systems, much-less formalization, much-lower costs.
Hmmm... Owen, have you defined performance targets for the oXml Author version? Have you collected feedback from folks who've worked with the current system?
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrBRBSv1FOs&t=2360s - video of George Bina demonstrating it
- On May 14, 2015, George Bina of Synchro Soft used StratML as an example in his demonstration of guided XML authoLOGNULL NowTransReader::ReadIt() JJFileMT::Truncate(21918513) LOGNULL NowTransReader::ReadIt() JJFileMT::Truncate(0) ring in oXygen 17
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B52kBMcqKhg&t=1764s - another video demo
Yes. Forms controls. Not a forms interface.
BTW: Phenomenal engineering. The systems that generate those little buttons are really sophisticated and use code generators to generate huge css stylesheets that don't seem to slow oXml down, that much.
Cool stuff, but someone actually engaged in authoring is likely to consider them training wheels.
I thought I had only used oXygen to create or edit a few StratML files, like these:
More like documents, but I want more whitespace. Why aren't there paragraph breaks in descriptions? (I'm working from memory). You're headings are weird, bouncing around inside the text. It's hard to read and it's hurting my head.
I see a bunch of stuff linked to itself. Huh? There's another convention for fine-grained linking, purple numbers. It comes out of the Doug Englebart school. (Again, documents, not data).
While in qa mode. Bold text is easy to read, but body text isn't. Point size if fine, but the stroke is too light and turns into a monotonous gray, especially in the large data bricks.
This is important stuff. I wish it were more writable and readable.
However, when I reveal the source and do a word-find search for "oxygen" at https://stratml.us/drybridge/index.htm, there are more of them than I remembered. (Note: In conjunction with development of the query service, Naval recently converted all of the files in the collection to apply the most recent stylesheet and they are now in a new /docs/ folder, meaning that the previous file locations will go away and the association with oXygen will be lost. See, for example, https://stratml.us/docs/POD.xml. I'll plan to maintain the previous versions indefinitely on my PC but, in order to avoid confusing the full-text indexing services, will most likely remove them from the StratML.us site when I'm confident the transition has been successfully accomplished.)
More recently I have used oXygen to find and fix errors created when I copied, edited, and inserted text in StratML files using Notepad. I have occasionally done that when long listings of stakeholders are available in a format that can be copied into Excel for the insertion of the appropriate tags on both sides of the text, after which I have used Notepad to insert the tagged text into files I had created with my XForms.
This sound similar to one of the things that I've been doing with prodoc. There's a document-level generation utility that extracts and summarizes all of the agents, artifacts, and behaviors in the document for downstream processing.
My XForms are available at https://stratml.us/forms2/Part1Form.xml & https://stratml.us/forms2/Part2Form.xml
Again, this is more what I consider to be a forms interface. Putting borders around topics in oXml works well, I have incorporated a number of paddings and border treatments in prodoc to help communicate the hierarchical context for where you're typing.
Owen, in closing, you used xsd to build an xml schema. You didn't build an xml doctype. I think that's a strategic challenge if the goal is to improve usability and adoption.
Off to my weekly Community engagement study group. This could be a project...
Thanks
Owen Ambur
https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenambur/
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 07:14:16 PM EST, Kurt Conrad <con...@sagebrushgroup.com> wrote:
Owen,
Sounds like I should see what you're doing in xforms. I don't really consider any of the current oXml styles really form-based.
I'll start thinking in that direction.
Thanks
/s/ kwc 2022.12.28 16:13
At 2022-12-28 10:31, Owen Ambur wrote:
I'm copying Kurt because he expressed interest in improving the forms-based framework for authoring/editing files in oXyen.
Kurt Conrad
<con...@SagebrushGroup.com>
SagebrushGroup.com
Facebook.com/KurtWConrad
LinkedIn .com/in/KurtWConrad
Zoom: 509 581 0832 / sagebrush
Kurt Conrad
<con...@SagebrushGroup.com>
SagebrushGroup.com
Facebook.com/KurtWConrad
LinkedIn .com/in/KurtWConrad
Zoom: 509 581 0832 / sagebrush