For engineering purposes "Data Sheets" have long been an accepted method of compiling and condensing what could be very verbose and inefficient descriptions of engineered products as they are put into service with a lot of unseen thought and documentation that disappears once the product is in service and more or less forgotten.
Project hri07e seeks to build on the Data Sheet paradigm and extend it to almost any physical and a good number of logical artifacts that get created by a project.
As discussed in the paper "Streamlining Control Valve Selection & Evaluation Process Using Electronic Data Exchange" even current data sheets in the common ISA formats can be used as the basis for automated information exchange using XML Schema - although the example given does not match the hri07e concept. For hri07e km48 data sheets the use of key codes defined by the SIG Data Dictionaries in the format <sig>:<key code> would be the tagging mechanism that would allow automated search and calculations - eventually.
One major "feature" of km48 data sheets is that they are in fact spreadsheets - in Google docs or Excel or OpenOffice formats - which are already search and calculation friendly and much more readable by humans that typical XML files. Even if they never get automated - the format is understandable and useful by people.
Q: Why use Google Sheets as the basis for HRI's Data Sheets?
A: The use of cloud based spreadsheets - as opposed to other formats - including word processed documents, csv files, xml files, forms, BIM files <whatever they might be>, and more specialized documents is that they are generally understood in structure and readability - while offering direct access to data without a lot of parsing and code.
- individual cells can accessed and linked with precison and edited easily.
- sorting and formating is predictable and reliable and easily controlled
- everybody knows how to read and use a spreadsheet.
as for Google sheets - as compared to Microsoft or othr products:
- Google stll offers the cleanest. lowest cost, most stable, most accessible, lowest lecsning hastle, good security, reasonable privacy, easeist to intgrate and least subject to bloatware system available. It may not be the most powerful - but 80% of Excel's features are unusable by mere mortals anyway.