Until January 2002, documents for ITU-T meetings were published on the web
using the ITUDOC system. As you may be aware, temporary documents and liaison
documents were made available through a separate access: the informal FTP area
for each Study Group/TSAG.
The numbering for these documents was not always consistent or unique.
Besides this lack of integration and certain scalability issues, ITUDOC lacked a
robust security scheme. As a result, ITU’s IS Department worked towards the
implementation of a strong solution for the ITU. After careful assessment of the
needs in the different areas of the ITU, the new ITU Document Management System
(DMS) was implemented.
DMS is already being used since last year to make ITU Publications available
to the public, and its feature for meeting documents was prototyped for the
December 2001 meeting of TSAG. After several improvements, the different ITU-T
study groups are migrating to DMS. SG 16 has just been migrated into the new
system and its next meeting in October 2002 will utilize DMS.
Summary of the features of the new system:
- The ITU Web Site provides now a more coherent
presentation of the information about Meeting Documents:
- New tools aimed at information retrieval
have been introduced on the ITU Web site for Meeting Documents:
- A Recently posted page specific to
Meeting Documents has been added.
- A Meeting Documents Search Engine now provides
both full-text and attribute-based retrieval. For example it is now possible
to retrieve all documents related to a specific question.
- A unique naming scheme for all ITU
documents has been developed and implemented for all meeting documents and is
being generalized to all ITU official documents.
When you download a Meeting
Document, the unique name is used for the downloaded
file.
This new unique naming scheme constitutes an important basis for all subsequent
efforts in the area of ITU electronic document handling.
Operational changes. With this new system, several aspects of the access
to ITU-T meeting documents will change:
- White and delayed contributions, reports, and
collectives for the whole Study Period 2001-2004 are available through DMS.
Temporary Documents (TDs) for meetings held after the migration will also be
available through DMS.
- The documents that used to be available
through ITUDOC/iFTP before the migration will continue to be available via the
older HTTP/FTP interfaces. However, new documents generated after the migration will in principle not
be available through ITUDOC/iFTP.
- Bulk download of documents can now be done
using directly the DMS interface. Document filtering (by language and by
format) will be added to improve this new facility. Bulk download of documents
using an FTP interface will not be possible under DMS because of security
concerns.
In the long-term, this is a new system that provides ITU members with added
value compared to the ITUDOC approach, and compensates for any migration hurdles
we may face now. To support you, the SG 16 Secretariat and the
TSB EDH group is
available for your suggestions and to help with your questions.
Some requested enhancements. As expected with any new system, there are
several areas for improvement. TSB EDH has been active collecting and
consolidating issues raised by users, in particular by ITU-T Groups that already
migrated into DMS. Here is a list of frequently mentioned issues:
- facility for bulk download of documents;
- filtering of documents by working party;
- sorting of documents by fields other than
document number.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to the SG 16
Secretariat (e-mail: tsbsg16@itu.int ) and the
TSB EDH (e-mail: tsbedh@itu.int
).
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