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The Adoption and Evolution of the OASIS DITA Standard

www.oasis-open.org. The Adoption and Evolution of the OASIS DITA Standard. OASIS Adoption Forum, London 18 th October 2005 Ian Larner (IBM) & Indi Liepa (DITA TC/Nokia). Contents. The road to a standard The value of DITA Uptake of the standard Plans for the evolution of the standard.

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The Adoption and Evolution of the OASIS DITA Standard

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  1. www.oasis-open.org The Adoption and Evolution of the OASIS DITA Standard OASIS Adoption Forum, London 18th October 2005 Ian Larner (IBM) & Indi Liepa (DITA TC/Nokia)

  2. Contents • The road to a standard • The value of DITA • Uptake of the standard • Plans for the evolution of the standard

  3. Contents • The road to a standard • The value of DITA • Uptake of the standard • Plans for the evolution of the standard

  4. Identify the need – Customer issues • Solutions, not products • Integration of information • Information glut • More meaningful information (role & task based) • Out-of-date information in books • Updating and maintaining information • Reduce cost of deployment of information • Provide information on-line • Reduce support costs • Customize and update information

  5. Components, Multiplatform, Integrated systems Printed Books Printed and online Books, online help Online information, Webs, printable & Printed books Limited reuse Single purpose Monolithic Book-Centered DTD Information Architecture Web-deployed products Partner and OEM use of information History of Markup - structured information 1970s: ISIL 1980s: BookMaster IPF 1990s: SGML, HTML 2000+ XML-based semantics Need for Change Shorter cycles Fewer people, Decreasing learning curves, Faster, better, cheaper

  6. Why DITA? • Structured information based on XML. Provides for greater consistency and interchange of content • Topic-orientation. Self-contained topics combine with other topics into information sets • Adds semantic tagging & meaning to the information • Vocabulary domains provide sets of elements whose names and content models are unique to an organization or field of knowledge • Can combine elements from any number of domains • Support of personalization through rich, extensible metadata • Reuse of content, design, and process allows integration across information spaces. Becomes a platform for collaboration and interchange – share across groups, companies • Support of conditional processing, automatic linking and link checking, and a “hands-off” reuse model • Support incremental specialization of design, processing, and vocabulary domains

  7. Darwin Information Typing Architecture Map Darwin: DITA utilizes principles of inheritance for specialization similar to OO programming Information Typing: DITA was designed for technical information based on information architecture types of Concept, Task and Reference Architecture: DITA is based on XML and supports extending design and processes through inheritance and specialization Goal-oriented Business Scenario OpenDocument OASIS standards Other standards Other … Non-DITA information

  8. General topic <topic id="installstorage"> <title>Installing a hard drive</title> <body> <ol> <li><ph>Unscrew the cover.</ph> <itemgroup>The drive bay...</itemgroup> </li> <li><ph>Insert the drive...</ph> <itemgroup>If you feel...</itemgroup> </step> </ol> </body> </topic> Specialized task <task id="installstorage"> <title>Installing a hard drive</title> <taskbody> <steps> <step><cmd>Unscrew the cover.</cmd> <stepresult>The drive...</stepresult> </step> <step><cmd>Insert the drive...</cmd> <info>If you feel resistance...</info> </step> </steps> </taskbody> </task> Key feature - specialization - extension by substitution • Declares more precise semantics • Enforces more constrained content models • Makes the content easier to understand, author, edit, validate, and process

  9. DITA as an OASIS standard • DITA 1.0 specification is an OASIS standard • XML tool vendors (Arbortext, Blast Radius, Idiom, Rascal, Syntext) • Consultants (Comtech, Innodata, Mulberrytech) • Companies (BMC, Boeing, IBM, Intel, Lucent, Oracle, Nokia, Sun) • Organizations (National Library of Medicine, US Department of Defense) • DITA Technical Committee working now on 1.1 requirements Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards

  10. DITA Open Toolkit • As Open Source on SourceForge • http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net • Reference implementation - being enhanced as a production system • Developing vendor/contributor relations for known build-out niches (FO, indexing, style interface, new outputs, etc.) • Users customize or extend the Toolkit

  11. Contents • The road to a standard • The value of DITA • Uptake of the standard • Plans for the evolution of the standard

  12. Business value of DITA • Faster time to value • create solution offering across industry stacks or within your business with different components • Increased reuse • of content by referencing topics in many map contexts • of designs by providing only the specialized delta on the general base • of processing by overriding the base only where needed • Investment protection • because of automated fallback to more general markup

  13. Value of DITA • Organizations and their OEMs can finally interoperate on the same open-standard base • Eliminating expensive and time-consuming conversions as part of the business cycle for componentized products • OASIS DITA and the DITA Open toolkit form a "Foundation for collaboration" for everyone • For organizations that need special vocabularies, DITA is a more natural way to support those needs • DITA provides default processing for new information models by default • Producing and supporting new domains much cheaper and less risky than "rolling your own" DTD and having to develop and support your own tools • Everyone who embraces DITA helps to grow the already large community that vendors have started to support • Bringing in competition and variety in the tools that you can purchase for authoring and producing DITA deliverables • DITA is not limited to product information (help, Webs, …) • DITA is being used in other organizations within a company, wherever the model of topic-oriented information is applicable.

  14. The Reality - Topic-level Content Reuse*http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r0/index.jsp R • z/OS • Distributed • Shared • Express • Base • Network *Based on work being done by S.Carpenter & D.Schell

  15. Contents • The road to a standard • The value of DITA • Uptake of the standard • Plans for the evolution of the standard

  16. www.oasis-open.org DITA uptake Cross-industry and organization uptake (production or proof of concept exercises): • Software • Telecommunications • Engineering • Education • Automotive • Genealogy … 2400+ Open Toolkit downloads since March 2005

  17. www.oasis-open.org Examples of DITA application • Technical user documentation for IBM software products • WebSphere, CICS … • Product creation process documentation in Nokia mobile phones • Service information, test cases, specifications, software documentation … • Software documentation and training at CEDROM-SNi implemented by IXIASOFT

  18. DITA at IBM • In use across IBM • 100s of projects • 100,000s of topics • Both new and converted from SGML or HTML • Translate DITA content into over 50 languages

  19. Contents • The road to a standard • The value of DITA • Uptake of the standard • Ongoing evolution of the standard

  20. DITA: A platform for collaboration • Content markup that’s specific to the subject area Marketing event announcements, Development functional specifications, orReal estate appraisal forms • Shared markup modules Across industry segments or communities and between partners • Local markup for the organization Agree on the shared basics, diverge on the local idiosyncrasies

  21. DITA 1.1 – key new features being specified • Support for metadata element specialization • Metadata attribute extension to support specialization of attributes for filtering and flagging • Formalization of “book” DTD and processing • Support for other XML vocabularies in topics • Introduction of a more general task type • Key-based referencing for referencing targets based on context

  22. DITA 1.1 – key enhancements being specified • Improved consistency of related topics references • Improved consistency of application of filtering and flagging attributes • Improved support for title reuse • Enhancements to index processing • Fixes to issues identified by community using 1.0

  23. Where next? • Learn more about DITA • OASIS – http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/dita • XML.org cover pages – http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html • Where do we take DITA together? • Join the dialog on the DITA forum –http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/ • Download the DITA Open Toolkit • http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/

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