The Railroad Industry Forum (RIF) is a task team of the National Association of Purchasing Managers who were tasked to develop a standard for the exchange of electronic parts catalog data within the North American railroad industry. The RIF members are comprised of major railroads and railroad manufacturers. SoftQuad and Applied Image Technology (AIT) provided the RIF technical expertise during the 2 year effort for completion of the standard. Mary McCarthy and Betty Harvey, Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. on behalf of SoftQuad, Inc developed the EPCES DTD.
The Railroad Industry Forum(RIF) Electronic Parts Catalog Exchange Standard (EPCES) is a standard that was developed by the RIF for interchange and presentation of illustrated parts catalog. The presentation of EPCES information has been designed to facilitate point and click capability.
The Railroad Industry Forum(RIF) Electronic Parts Catalog Exchange Standard (EPCES) has been converted to HTML to enable electronic viewing. Rich Dickeson from Union Pacific Railroad has been kind enough to convert the document from Word into HTML.
To facilitate the ability for RIF members to understand the RIF EPCES Document Type Definition (DTD) a sample document which has been encoded (tagged) compliant to the EPCES DTD. In order to view the sample document a you will need to download a copy of an SGML browser.
The DTD, sample encoded documents and information pertain to the final Phase III document.
The following sample RIF SGML files are available for viewing with Panorama.
The following information and standard may be useful to download to understand the RIF EPCES standard:
Just in case you have free time on your hands and would like to read more about SGML, MIL-M-1840B and anything else I think you might find useful while in the implementation of the EPCES standard, I have included some interesting links below.
Creating the MIL-STD-1840
Magnetic Tape
List of SGML Resources
Web space donated by Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc.