Single Source Publishing - Implementation - Designing The Master

Designing The Master

One of the more difficult parts of single sourcing is designing the master formats. To do this, you need to notice if you have a lot of similar things that all need to be documented. For example, menus and dialogs in an application, classes in a programming application programmer interface (API), widgets in a line of similar products, objects in a museum collection, parts of complex machines, products for sale in an online store, and so forth. Once you have identified a set of similar items, what characteristics do each of these items have in common? A computer programmer or analyst skilled at object-oriented programming can be helpful at this stage in identifying and organizing common attributes. Store information about each object and attribute in your master file. How to do this of course varies considerably depending upon the nature of your master file. In choosing the master file format, keep in mind those who will maintain the actual words. Often, it will be technical or professional writers. Choose a tool that they are familiar with or can learn quickly. Raw XML, for example, might be difficult for many writers to manually input accurately.

Having fine and quantified granularity of your information can be helpful in enabling various methods of massaging the data for different output modalities. For example, you don't want your master file to consist of pages upon pages of unorganized text about the object. You generally want to know such things as its name, its category, a short description, a long description, perhaps how it is used in a given context. For a museum item, for example, you would want its catalog number, the collection it's from, its age, where it was collected from, how it was acquired, its value if known, its use, its provenance, its historical context, etc. With all of these individual pieces of information, you can output cards for use in displays, descriptions for the museum's web site, and printed manuals describing specific collections. If you just have pages of unorganized text, this becomes much more difficult to manage from a single source perspective.

If you have a database containing information about the objects, study it. There will be many ideas contained therein about what might be interesting about the items you are documenting. A database programmer can also be helpful in helping you to design your master files.

There may be multiple dimensions to the master data. For example, you might have the data translated into various languages. Every time you add a dimension, you make maintenance of the master data exponentially more difficult. However, if the problem you are solving warrants multiple dimensions, then it is also likely a good candidate for single sourcing.