This product exists today because of the tireless efforts invested by many persons associated with the development of ITS standards.  Many of us have made the transition over the years from committee volunteers into the position of being paid consultants to the committees or organizations that we support.  Still, there has always been a strong volunteer spirit to "do it the right way"  and a willingness to expend the time and effort needed to address the needs of real practitioners in crafting the data dictionaries and message sets.  No one, in any of this, has ever had a funded task to "work out how the data registry process should evolve" although this has often been the net result.  The principal authors of the various standards (the data stewards in most cases) have given of their own time and developed a sense of reciprocal trust with each other that has improved the standards considerately over the span of years. 

That being said,  four organizations should be expressly mentioned here.

The SAE provided the initial formal contract oversight and funding channel to improve Mini-Edit from an in-house tool to something for community use and to move it to becoming a necessary part of the standards production and sharing process.

The IEEE  took over the role of the SAE when conditions changed there and remains today the formal contract oversight and funding channel for this tool support.  Under this oversight, all the SDOs were polled and a list of the then most critical required features were outlined, funded, and built into the tool.  This is expected to be the method used and any further formal tool advances.

The FHWA-JPO saw the need for this tool and was willing to fund its on-going development.  While FHWA monies for this task are slight when compared to other efforts, all concerned are most grateful for the project funding and see it as a very cost effective data sharing investment.  FHWA, of course, sees the critical need for consistent quality in the ITS standards which is a product of this. 

Finally, while each and every committee and data steward that has used these tools has contributed value to the development process, one organization stands above the rest for their ceaseless support, technical assistance, and vision of ITS standards meeting a level of uniform quality.  That would be the staff of Mitretek Systems who have worked with the Mini-Edit development team for over five years now to address new challenges to the standards and the deployments as they occur. For example, today all of the XML found in ITS follows consistent formats and styles (rather then being different towers of babble) due in large part to the technical leadership of this group. 

   And neither is any useful tool. 
   This edition of the tool, and these help pages, 
   are dedicated to all those that have brought it so far along.