The Emergency Response example Project translation and adaptation

A couple weeks ago while discussing the long list of example projects that come with the Oracle Policy Modeller, I decided to adapt and translate the Emergency Response to another language (in this case French). Here is the run down of the work on the Emergency Response example project translation.

The idea behind this post just to give you some feedback on the various issues that I encountered. Many of these will be generic to similar exercises in any language,so will be hopefully of interest to the wider community. There is no belief or assumption that this is an exhaustive list, it’s just somebody trying to give some feedback.

I am totally aware that there is a sophisticated translation functionality within Oracle Policy Automation, but when you’re dealing with a customer who speaks multiple languages, and subject matter experts who do not necessarily speak all the national languages, sometimes the choice of language for your project is not something you can control, so building this demonstration project was a useful tool in communicating with some of my customers about the capabilities of the product.

Note : I long for the day when inside a single project, I can have Word documents, in different languages, using some sort of formatting markup.

Firstly let’s just walk through what the Emergency Response example project translation entails by looking at the original. It has a single Word document with essentially three different Business rules :

• A stack of Booleans, one each for the different hazard warning signs (present yes/no).
• A couple of rules to decide whether or not to accept a manually entered address if the localisation in the browser did not work
• Finally, a rule to concatenate latitude and longitude with a URL from the Google maps static API at .com.au 😉

For the purposes of this exercise I choose to work from a document from the Ministère des Transports, de la Mobilité durable
et de l’Électrification des transports in Canada which I was able to download in French. So where did the issues occur?

1. Obviously since the Booleans we were referring to reference hazard warning signs that were specific to a certain country, it was necessary to either adapt, eliminate, or add further rules to identify each of the classification and sub-classifications of hazardous materials. For the time being though I kept the same structure of the Word document.
2. Since each of the hazardous materials was linked to a image file to display a image toggle , it was obviously necessary to obtain and reference new additional image files and update the image toggle in the interview.
3. The interview included static text introducing the concepts and explaining the goal so those needed to be translated.
4. The rule which concatenated the URL relied upon latitude / longitude being number attributes, formatted with a separator that was a period or dot. This is not the case for many regions. Besides, this demonstration project is constructed in 2013. At that stage the JavaScript extension API was not available. It felt like the creation of a pop-up window with a Google map inside it was counter-productive for a project aiming to showcase a mobile-friendly user interface.
5. The manual address entry – if browser localisation was not available – needed to be updated to respect the format of an address in the country that I was targeting, notably for the postcodes and states.
6. Finally the project used one static header image which would need to be replaced since it included English text.

Along the way, while working on this little Emergency Response example project translation a couple of other points came up :

• The output of the existing version was not, in my humble opinion, very friendly for the rule Developer. I converted it to a set of inferred entity instances which allowed for a more detailed output and potentially some additional information like what to do in the presence of certain chemicals. It also helped create a notion of class of Hazard.
• The slider to select the number of vehicles was transformed into two image sliders , one for light and the other for heavy vehicles. Cosmetic more than anything.

So the Emergency Response example project translation contained one Word and one Excel document, some more image files, a JavaScript extension and a few small modifications to the actual logic based on the legislation and classifications. If anyone wants a copy of the project I’m happy to share it, just leave a note in the comments.

Have a nice day and watch out for the next one!