The
DAVIC philosophy of work
The DAVIC way
of producing technical specifications
The
nature of DAVIC specifications
The DAVIC
workplan
Download of
specification
DAVIC has developed its own philosophy of work to reach its statutory goals of producing technical specifications providing interoperability across application and countries overcoming the current limitations of standardisation.
1. Not systems but tools. Traditional standardisation tends to define vertically integrated systems with little or no attention to similar systems in other domains. DAVIC's goal being interoperability across applications systems cannot be specified but "components" (tools) that are non-"system-specific" because they have to be usable by different industries in different systems and still guarantee interoperability. Typically the process of tool specification is carried out as follows:
2. Relocation of tools. The need to support business and service models of multiple industries impose that not only tools should be usable in a variety of different systems but also in different parts of the same systems. Therefore DAVIC defines its tools in such a way that they can be relocated, whenever this relocation is technically feasible and practically meaningful.
3. One functionality - one tool. Tools should be unique, a principle sometimes hard to enforce, but compliance to this principle gives substantial benefits in terms of interoperability and availability of technology thanks to the easier achievement of a critical mass because of a wider field of applicability of the technology. Sometimes tools can contain normative improvements to specifications that do not affect backwards compatibility. What constitutes a tool is not always obvious, as tools may depend on the particular technological situation: a video decoder today must be implemented in dedicated silicon, but in a few years it will be possible to have programmable processors where decoding algorithms are "downloaded".
4. Specify the minimum. That a standard should specify the minimum that is necessary for interoperability looks like obvious. But it was not always so. When standards were produced by associations of particular industries it was natural to add to the "minimum" those nice little things that bring a standard nearer to a product specification. The border of "minimum" then became blurred. This approach was fostered by the concept of "guaranteed quality" so dear to broadcasters and telecommunication operators alike because of their "public service" nature. A multi-industry environment like DAVIC does not have a single constituency to satisfy but tens of them so it has to specify the very minimum that is needed for interoperability.
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