Universal Authoring Framework and it's use in Terminology Editing

The CDC generates and distributes data to partner organizations in the form of vocabularies, implementation guides, and ontologies. The communication between reporting organizations require that the vocabulary that is used be consistent and of high quality.  Managing the creation of new vocabulary data with strict rules for governance and collaboration exceed the abilities of generalized applications and require specific tools with greater flexibility.

The CDC has embarked upon the creation of a tool designed to create and maintain these artifacts.  The goal of the tool is to provide a core platform that supports an interface for components.  The UAF is based on the Eclipse RCP framework, and utilizes the standard plug-in API to create a composite application which can be used author the various components used for communication. The UAF provides an integration point for standard workflow such as data loading, governance, publishing and security.  Each of these components is designed as a separate plug-in.  Each plug-in provides an API which is accessible by the others to provide a single application capable of growing with future requirements.  The intent is to provide a set of authoring APIs which can be extended or augmented to support different environments and solutions integrated in a tool that can be used by various users to create and maintain information.

We will present the current state of the UAF and its components, and discuss the future plans for the UAF and how it may be used to provide cross partner collaborations.