Case Study on Redlining at the ISO Chandi Perera

ISO International Organization for Standardization  World's largest developer and publisher of International Standards  164 national standard bodies  experts into 3484 technical bodies  Collaboration with 649 international organizations  Total of International Standards

Single Source Publishing

Redline Publications Traditionally done manually Only for the most popular standards documents Always for adjacent versions only High cost of production Delayed release

Automation Approach Identify the changes Render the changes

Track Changes Approach

Pros Changes can be seen by committee members as they author or update a standard. Side notes can be applied to the content to explain changes. Supported in Microsoft Word

Track Changes Approach Cons There is a requirement for editors and authors to keep track changes enabled. Any author or editor can “hide” changes by accepting tracked changes. There is a likelihood of lots of false changes being captured during intensive editing stages.

Track Changes Approach Cons The Word document becomes cluttered if there are lots of changes. The ability to redline across non-adjacent versions. Not everyone uses Microsoft Word, and copy and pasting from another application will mark the whole section as changed

XML Differencing Compare two versions of the same XML document and get an intelligent result

XML Differencing Pros Not dependent on author behavior or applications No need to retrain contributors Only comparing final documents Can compare non adjacent versions

XML Differencing Cons More complex to implement Requires additional software

XML Differencing How it works Output XML contains both versions

XML Differencing How it works MarkupMeaning deltaxml:deltaV2="A=B"the content of that element (and its children) has not changed deltaxml:deltaV2="A"content is unique to document A deltaxml:deltaV2="B"content is unique to document B deltaxml:deltaV2="A!=B" indicates that that element (or one or more of its descendants) has changed between documents

Creating the Redline

Redline Workflow

Rendering the Changes Text Images Tables Mathematics

Rendering Text Unchanged text old/deleted text new/added text

Rendering Images

Detecting Change Images Change in the figure filename/file path Change in the image file signature Change to figure XMP metadata

Rendering Tables Content change only: Render the same as text changes Structure changes: Render the same as figures

BUT!!!! Sometimes tables are used improperly

New edition

Change

Solution Address the editorial process and style Change table structure only when necessary

Rendering Mathematics Compare the MathML Render the images in changes Can lead to false positives between different versions of MathML or different ways of expressing the same equation

Rendering Reducing Clutter Do not render the changes that does not change the meaning

Rendering Rules addition or deletion of semi-colons change from hyphen to non-breaking hyphen change from hyphen to en rule and vice versa change from hyphen to em rule and vice versa addition or deletion of white space

Rendering Rules change from one type of white space to another (i.e. from space to non-breaking space) change from apostrophe to prime and vice versa change from hyphen to minus and vice versa change from flat text to hyperlinked text change from “equation” to “formula”

BUT!!! Be Careful Addition and removal of commas Capitalization changes Changes from italic to roman or back

Challenges Inconsistent Markup

Challenges Inconsistent Markup

Due to XML being generated from scratch each time there is no consistent id attributes would significant assist in the redline process Challenges Lack

Automated creation of Redline Publications is possible If you cannot control the authoring process change tracking approach will not work ISO-STS (by extension JATS) provides reasonable support for XML Differencing/Redline Consistency of tagging between versions is critical Conclusions

QUESTIONS Chandi Perera