DITA East 2007

Being heads-down with other work, I haven't found (or made) the time to add entries.

Amber Swope opened up the conference with a presentation about the business case for DITA in the context of localization.

DITA East 2007 just wrapped up. I had three presentations: The Interoperability Framework, a new one where I spoke about where some directions we would like the DITA standard to move toward, and I presented Kevin Dorr's presentation about DITA and Content Exchange. Overall, I think they were received well.

There were a lot of good presentations. Robert Anderson (IBM), gave several good presentations around the DITA OT and specialization. France Baril gave a presentation about reuse strategies.

Joe Gollner gave a very good and very insightful impromptu presentation on Saturday. Essentially, standards (like DITA and S1000D) are tools - not solutions. These should be used to enable process, but they should not define it.

The discussion panel at the end was truly illuminating for me. The key takeaway for me was that several people are very interested in the "best practices" for implementing and using DITA in their environment.

For so long, I've been focused on DITA-as-technology, which is intriguing in its own right. Interoperability, specializations are definitely fascinating and important to understand. Still, from the discussion, I interpreted the "best practices" remarks to reflect a fundamental facet of the standard that needs more focus: DITA-as-process.

Many know the basic benefits of DITA: modularity, reuse, localization, the concept and benefits of specialization, etc. But most are really interested in answering very gut-level questions. How will DITA affect how I create and publish content? How (Where) do I change how I design my content with DITA? Where and when do I reuse? When should I conref content?

With that in mind, I learned quite a bit about where DITA needs to focus.

DITA West 2007: Day 2 - Dimented and Topic-oriented

Amber Swope from Just Systems gave a great keynote presentation on Localization issues with DITA content. Interestingly, it doesn't just apply to DITA, and has broad implications to any organization that does/will have L10N or I18N as part of their deliverable stream, regardless of whether they're using structured/unstructured content. With that said, DITA does have unique advantages in minimizing L10n/I18N costs in that it can encapsulate (read: mitigate) the volume of content that needs to be translated.

In the same vein, Amber gave another presentation on "controlling" your content using a CMS, and other processes to provide efficiency, content integrity, and protection from liability (life, limb and legal)

The highlight however, was Paul Masalsky's (EMC) presentation. He spoke about the trials and tribulations of integrating DITA in an enterprise environment. The most memorable part of his presentation (and the conference thus far) was his DITA rap. It was AMAZING! I, along with the rest of the audience was completely wowed! If I can get a hold of the lyrics, I will post them here. I don't remember all of the lyrics, but one verse rhymed "dimented" and "topic-oriented" It was fantastic! Who says geeks are one-dimensional?!!!

Scott Hudson and I are working on the last minute preparations for our presentation tomorrow. It promises to be thought-provoking, and provide some neat demonstrations of how content from different standards like DocBook, DITA, ODF and others can interoperate. I think that this definitely has potential for enabling heterogenous environments to solve the difficult problem of "how do I reconcile content that doesn't quite fit my model?"

Hope to see you there.

DITA West 2007: Day 1

It was finally nice to put faces to names I've worked with, in addition to meeting some new folks. So far it looks like the conference has about 80 or so attendees. It could be a result of the Super Bowl that the attendance was a little low. Hopefully more will show up tomorrow. Unfortunately, Michael Priestly and Don Day aren't here. Was looking forward to talking with him more about the Interoperability Framework.

Lou Iuppa from XyEnterprises gave the opening Keynote. Essentially the thesis was that DITA would benefit by the use of a CMS

Looks like the majority of the attendees are Technical Writers either new to DITA, or in the process of implementing a DITA solution in their organization. Definitely hoping to see some more technical presos, though Yas Etessam's presentation on "Enabling Specializations in XMetaL Author" was very interesting.

A fair number of vendors booths in the hallway outside the conference rooms, including one from Flatirons Solutions. Just Systems, PTC, MarkLogic were among some.

Go to DITA West, Young Man

My colleague, Scott Hudson and I are presenting a paper at the DITA 2007 West Conference in San Jose, February 5-7. I am very excited about this.

The thesis of the paper focuses on proposing a DocStandards Interoperability Framework to enable various document markup languages like (but not limited to) DocBook, DITA, and ODF to share and leverage content by using an interchange format that each standard can write to and read from.

There are several advantages to this approach:

• It doesn't impede future development for any standard, since the interchange is a "neutral" format. This means that new versions of a document markup standard can leverage content from earlier versions
• Since it is neutral, it can potentially be used by virtually any document markup standard

This work stems from Scott's and my involvement in the DocStandards Interoperability List, an OASIS forum. We're hoping to spark interest in the XML community to push this along and create a new OASIS Technical Committee for DocStandards Interoperability.

We're still in the process of editing the whitepaper, which will be posted on Flatirons Solutions' website in the near future.