[Sigia-l] managing standards

[Ruth Kaufman]

I'm working with a team that creates and manages internal standards for 
content structures for various document/content types. The content 
structures can become complex - working with nested elements, 
allowed-values lists, translation requirements, metrics requirements 
for compliance, etc. All of these standards are maintained manually in 
excel and word documents. We're more than ready to upgrade to a tool 
that will allow us to:
a) construct document types (aka content types) out of an element 
library
b) manage an element library (currently a data dictionary)
c) make changes that can cascade through derivative and child elements
d) do an impact analysis of changes to standards (right now we manually 
maintain a "Where used" column in our data dictionary spreadsheet.)
e) potentially, correlate these XML content structures with other 
corresponding standards including display, editorial and coding 
standards, as well as corresponding metrics (this might simply be done 
with a particular entry's key)
f) search for elements and element attributes
g) construct and maintain allowed values lists
h) construct compound elements (similar to requirement (a))
i) create derivative elements
j) some kind of life-cycle management or versioning features (related 
to (d) and (e))

We probably have more requirements, but this is a good starter set.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ruth