Day Two DITA 2006 Conference Evening Update

March 25, 2006 Blog No Comments

Day Two of the DITA 2006 Conference was an exciting one, indeed…loaded with interesting presentations and activities. I had a great time co-hosting four hours of internet radio programming with Scott Draughon, host of MyTechnologyLawyer internet radio show. There were so many listeners to the morning program that we exceeded capacity (500 listeners) and some folks were unable to listen in. Archived versions of the programs are in post-production now and will be made available soon on compact disc.

The show guests offered up valuable information, some of which had not been released anywhere prior to show. Of particular value was the last hour of the program which featured content management technology guru Bob Doyle (CMS Review) and Norman Walsh (Sun Microsystems). Doyle provided listeners with an excellent historical overview of content creation technologies and markup languages, using the content of the MyTechnologyLawyer website to explain how reuse works and how it might be leveraged to take control of the content in the thousands of legal contracts offered on the site.

Doyle recently completed an analysis of XML authoring tools as part of an upcoming article for E-Content magazine. During his research, Doyle identified 75 XML authoring products, settling on a final eight tools to evaluate. All of the tools evaluated were very good at what they claim to do, but Doyle warned would be purchasers to avoid getting caught in the marketing trap. Vendors whose products don’t yet include support for DITA asked him not to document that fact because they “plan to” support DITA. Of course, Doyle isn’t so easily swayed, knowing there is a big difference between planning to support a standard, and actually doing so.

Norman Walsh joined the program mid way, after having completed a lunchtime presentation on DITA and DocBook. Walsh was very informative and provided a reality check of sorts. The facts: DocBook is a well-established documentation standard, in use for over ten years. DITA has been a standard for less than than one year. Millions and millions of XML documents have already been created with DocBook. While Walsh stopped short of saying DocBook was better than DITA, he did say that DocBook can do pretty much anything that DITA can do, adding that he expects to continue working closely with the DITA Technical Committee to explore ways the two standards can work together, supporting each other in working towards interoperability (one of the main goals of XML). The takeaway? It’s not about which is better, it’s about which one is right for your purposes. Each standard has its strengths and weaknesses and opinions differ among experts from each camp. Your mileage may vary.

Doyle and Walsh, both experience experts in the information technology area, answered questions for listeners and added significant value to the DITA discussion.

Alex Povzner of SiberLogic did a great presentation extolling the virtues of semantically-enabled documentation (the so-called “Holy Grail” of technical communication). Povzner described and defined Semantic Content Management (SCM), which he believes represents a new paradigm in XML-based content management. Povzner said the need for SCM is based on documentation quality shortfalls he referred to as the “Five I’s”—irrelevance, inconsistency, incompleteness, inaccuracy, and inaccessibility.

“DITA alone cannot solve these problems,” he said. Leveraging advances in Resource Definition Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Semantic Web technology, Povzner said “SCM can facilitate more effective knowledge transfer from product designers to technical writers, and in turn to consumers of this information. SCM allows technical content authors to capture, store and manage formal knowledge expressed as axioms and facts along with the traditional informal textual content. Facts and axioms stored in the form of formal knowledge graphs allow the end user to interact with the knowledge base by entering formal questions and receiving accurate formal answers accompanied by references to the related parts of the informal content.” The presentation was accompanied by a demonstration of SiberLogic SiberSafe CMS.

Content Management Professionals held an after hours face-to-face meeting that was well attended. CM Pros members mixed and mingled with non-members and enjoyed dinner, drinks and conversation.

More to come!