The Adoption and Evolution of the OASIS DITA Standard

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The Adoption and Evolution of the OASIS DITA
Standard
www.oasis-open.org

• OASIS Adoption Forum, London
• 18th October 2005
• Ian Larner (IBM) Indi Liepa (DITA TC/Nokia)

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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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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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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• Out-of-date information in books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

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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
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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

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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
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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

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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
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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

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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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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

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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.

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The Reality - Topic-level Content
Reusehttp//publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wa
sinfo/v6r0/index.jsp
R

• z/OS
• Distributed
• Shared
• Express
• Base
• Network

Based on work being done by S.Carpenter
D.Schell
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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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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

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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

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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

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Contents

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

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DITA A platform for collaboration

• Content markup thats 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

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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

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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

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Where next?

• Learn more about DITA
• OASIS http//www.oasis-open.org/committees/dita
• XML.org cover pages http//xml.coverpages.org/di
  ta.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/