DITA Interoperability

transcript

DITA interoperabilityUsing standards to connect the dots

Session at tcworld 20168 November 2016Stuttgart, Germany

Participants• Jean-François Ameye, IXIASOFT

• George Christian Bina, Syncro Soft

• Kristen James Eberlein, Chair of DITA TC & Eberlein Consulting

• Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research

• Eliot Kimber, Contrext

Agenda1. What is interoperability and why should I care?

2. Open standards: What they are, OASIS and DITA, benefits

3. Unique DITA contribution: Specialization

4. The specialization used in the demo

5. Demos!

6. Takeways from the demos

7. Questions? Discussion

What is interoperability?And why should I care? • Interoperability is enabled by open standards.

• With DITA, interoperability means:• DITA content can be processed by multiple,

interoperable applications.

• DITA content can be shared and exchanged within a wide technical environment.

• DITA content is portable and can be moved through multiple business environments.

• DITA also is extensible; DITA content can be specialized without affecting interchange.

What is an open standard?

• Developed under the governance of an standards organization, whose rules direct how the work is conducted.

• Standards guaranteed to be free and available in perpetuity.

• DITA is developed and maintained by a techical committee at OASIS.

More about OASIS …

• A not-for-profit consortium that develops open standards

• More than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in more than 65 countries.

• Distinguished by its transparent governance and operating procedures:

• Membership is open to everyone.• Members set the OASIS technical agenda.• Specification are ratified by open ballot.• Officers are chosen by democratic election.• Consortium leadership is based on individual merit and is not tied to

financial contribution, corporate standing, or special appointment.

DITA at OASIS

• DITA is developed and maintained by the DITA Technical Committee (TC).

• Work of the TC– DTDs, minutes, reports, e-mail, specification drafts –is visible to everyone.

• Checks and balances built into the process:

• Members and the general public can comment before a standard is approved.

• The TC must acknowledge and track these comments.

High-level overview: Benefits of open standards

• Development of wide array of tools that support the standard

• Development of robust community of users and developers who are familiar with the standard

• Enables companies to be increasingly agile and participate in the quick-paced, modern, business economy

Benefits of an open standard: Tools

• A standard architecture and element/attribute set encourages the proliferation of tools that support the standard:

• Authoring tools• CCMs• Rendering engines• Localization workbenches• Publishing formats• Delivery portals

• Competition and collaboration drives cost down and prevents vendor lock-in

Benefits of an open standard: Community

A growing community of users and developers who are familiar with the standard:

• Creates a bigger hiring pool of resources

• Enables employees to become productive more quickly (reduces time to train people on proprietary tools)

• Generates user-built forums for problem solvingand innovation

• Spawns conferences and user groups

• Supports collaboration

Benefits of an open standard: Business agility• Content can be more easily shared with business partners and suppliers

• Prepares business for a future that includes acquisitions, mergers, partnerships, development of new product suites

• Supports an enterprise environment that contains divisions that use multiple tools

• Positions businesses to adopt new technologies as they emerge

And what does DITA add?

• Extensibility!

• Specialization enables companies to develop markup that:• Meets their specific business needs

• Remains interchangeable

• And much more, including • Profound cost lowering compared to other XML solutions• Powerful reuse mechanisms that:

• Enable rapid rebranding• Streamline the content process• Enforce editorial consistency

What is specialization?

• A unique feature of the DITA architecture

• Ability to define a new object as a more specific type of an existing object

• Specializations can be generalized back to the ancestor element

• Examples:

• Automobile• Sports car• Truck• Limousine• Sedan

• Quotation• Pull-quote• Inline quote• Block quote

Benefits of specialization

• Increased semantic meaning drives authoring precision, findability, etc

• Reduces new design and development work; you can build on existing design and development work

• Easy to share with others (business partners, other divisions of a company, etc.)

• Lowers cost

• Makes meeting future business requirements less expensive

Specialization in the demo

• The sample set for this demo contains a very simple specialization.

• A FAQ topic that contains elements for “question” and “answer”

Summary

• Two factors – DITA as a standard & DITA specialization – act to enable interchange between companies as never before.

• A rich, competitive tool environment• Community of DITA authors and developers• Acceleration of business agility

• DITA enables content to flow rapidly in the interconnected, fast-paced modern economy.

Introducing the demonstration scenariosJoe GollnerGnostyx Research

What we will see• The demonstration scenarios

will show• A supply chain of companies

all working with DITA Content and sharing that content

• Some companies using out-of-the box DITA

• Other companies providing & usingspecialized DITA

• DITA generalization being used to sharespecialized DITA with service providerswho work with out-of-the-box DITA like many localization service providers(without losing the value of the specialization)

Tools we will seeThe scenarios use the following DITA tools:

• oXygen Editor• IXIASOFT DITA CMS• DITA Open Toolkit• DITA4Publishers• Titania Delivery

We will see that DITA content(out-of-the-box & specialized)

• Can move easily between tools• Can be processed in many ways• Can be leveraged using

• New community-developed capabilities

• DITA4Publishers• Innovative new product capabilities

fostered by a competitive market for DITA tools

Core scenariosOWLSoft

Software Supplierprovides OEM components

ThunderbirdSoftware

Software Integrator aggregates components

& content from suppliers like OwlSoft &

HawkVision

NetCoCustomer of Thunderbird who delivers portable product documentation with their own guidance

ACMESolutions

Business services partner of NetCo that leverages a dynamic

knowledge base

1. OwlSoftSpecialist software providerusing out-of-the-box DITA

2. Thunderbird Softwarecombining components & content from suppliersa. Out-of-the-box DITAb. Specialized DITAc. Generalized DITA

3. NetCoCustomer that delivers an ePub with product and procedure documentation

4. AcmeBusiness services partner of NetCo that deploys a dynamic online knowledge base

DITA authoring scenarioUsing oXygen XML Editor and oXygen XML Web Author

George BinaSyncro Soft

Scenario #1: Authoring DITA contentOwlSoft develops a product named StormCluster, which is included in solutions for several business partners.

OwlSoft develops their documentation in DITA for several reasons:• Partners require XML to enable multi-channel publication• Easy to rebrand the content for different partners• Relatively low-cost of entry due to the robust tool environment

OwlSoft uses out-of-the-box DITA – no specializations – and GitHub for version control.

OwlSoft uses both the desktop and Web-based version of oXygen XML Editor. The oXygen XML Web Author provides developers with easy access to review and contribute content.

Overview• Work with DITA in a desktop editor (oXygen XML Editor)

• Publish to different formats – PDF, WebHelp

• Enable contributions and review using an online editor (oXygen XML Web Author)

OWLSoft User Guide - DITA map

Quick view of all topics from the user guide

The “Logging on to MobileView” topic

Mark “log in” as user interface control

Different degrees of showing structure

Quick publishing to many formats

WebHelp – using aqamarine theme

WebHelp - topic page

PDF – table of contents

PDF – topic view

WebHelp with EDIT action – topic view

Click to open in oXygen XML Web Author

Save to commit changes to repository

Request to accept the proposed change

Automatic re-publishing of updated content

Updated WebHelp content

Take-aways• DITA is a good fit for small companies

• You can have immediate deliverables

• Combining different services, you can get a lot of functionality with a reasonable budget

DITA storage scenarioUsing IXIASOFT DITA CMS

Jean-François AmeyeIXIASOFT

Scenario #2: Storing contentThunderbird is one of the companies that includes StormCluster in their solutions.

As their company became more successful and sold more products, they purchased a CMS (the IXIASOFT DITA CMS). They needed the CMS because they:

• Have a large number of writers

• Localize content

• Have multiple product lines with content reused among them

Thunderbird integrates a product from another company: HawkVision. Some of HawkVision’s DITA content uses a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) specialization, so Thunderbird added that specialization to their repository.

Thunderbird needs to translate the HawkVision content VERY QUICKLY. In order to expedite matters – avoid the localization vendor needing to do any configuration work – Thunderbird generalizes the content. When the translated content is imported into the CMS, it is re-specialized.

What you’ll see1. Integrating the FAQ specialization

2. Importing the FAQ content

3. Creating a new FAQ topic

4. Exporting the content as generalized (OOB) DITA to optimize localization

Scenario 2, step 1: OwlSoft content integrated in Thunderbird CCMS

Company name and logo changed to “Thunderbird”

StormClusterUser Guide provided by

OwlSoft

Scenario 2, step 2: HawkVision specialized FAQ content

FAQ specialization is not recognized

because the plugin hasn’t been integrated

Topic uses the FAQ specialization

Scenario 2, step 3: FAQ specialization integrated in CCMS

FAQ specialization plugin integrated in

DITA CMS configuration

Scenario 2, step 4: HawkVision content in CCMS

FAQ topics can now be imported in the CCMS and added

to the StormClusterUser Guide

Scenario 2, step 5: FAQ content exported in generalized form

Exported topic uses the out-of-the-box

OASIS concept type

Specialized elements have been generalized but

retain their specialized @class attribute

Exported map can be opened in a tool that

does not have the FAQ

specialization

DITA publishing scenarioUsing DITA Open Toolkit and DITA for Publishers

Eliot KimberContrext

Scenario #3: Publishing to EPUBNetCo Limited is a customer of Thunderbird; it wants to add their content to Thunderbird + HawkVision and publish their content to EPUB for use by field technicians who will be viewing content on a hand-held device.

They decide to use DITA for Publishers to generate EPUB.

NetCo receives the source content from Thunderbird, who exported it from their CMS as a ZIP file. They also shared the DTD files for the specialized marketing FAQ.

What you’ll see1. Install DTDs

2. Create a master publication that aggregates content from the two companies

3. Generate EPUB

Install DTDs• No screen capture provided

Create a master publication

Generate EPUB (1 of 2)

Generate EPUB (2 of 2)

DITA dynamic delivery scenarioUsing Titania Delivery

Kristen James EberleinEberlein Consulting

Scenario #4: Exploring dynamic deliveryAcme Solutions is a services partner of NetCo. Company.

As a services provider, they need to provide a dynamic knowledge base for alltheir customers and business.

Acme Solutions decide to investigate using Titania Delivery in order to publish content from many companies in a Web portal that can be updated directly as companies approve content in their CMS.

What you’ll see …1. Integrating DTDs

2. Uploading content

3. Making content visible in the portal

4. Viewing content in the portal

Create a DTD project

Upload the DTDs

Associate the DTDs with the content project

Upload the content and away you go!

Double-check … yes, this is specialized content.

Rendered in customer-facing portal

Note that we did NOT install any style sheets; the application is specialization-aware and rendered the new elements based on their ancestry.

So what have we seen?

• Ease of installing and publishing specialized content

• Simply share the DTDs

• Fallback rendering

• No need to create new style for the specialized elements

• The specialized elements inherit the styles from the ancestor elements.

DITA interoperabilitysummationJoe GollnerGnostyx Research

DITA and interoperability• Openness & extensibility

• Essential for interoperability• Permit business partners to

• Optimize individually• Optimize as a partner networkat the same time

• Creates an innovation marketplace• Community innovations• Vendor innovations

• Essential to making Intelligent Information a reality

Questions and answers, discussion

We want feedback …

Your opinion is important to us!

Please tell us what you thought of the sessions.

Send feedback by scanning the QR code or going to the following URL:

http://dita03.honestly.de

DITA ForumAll DITA Forum presentations are in Room 6.1 OG.

8:45–9:30 DITA Customization: Create Your Own Flavor

9:45–10:30 From Custom XML to DITA

11:15–13:00 DITA Interoperability

14:45–15:30 DITA: The Road to Delivering Digital Content atSiemens Rail

16:15–17:00 Developing Training Websites in Multiple Languageswith (Mostly) Open-Source Tools

17:15–18:00 DITA: A Big Decision: Custom XML versus XMLStandards—or No XML at All?

Applications used in the demos

• oXygen XML Editor and oXygen XML WebHelp

• IXIASOFT DITA CMS

• DITA Open Toolkit

• DITA for Publishers

• Titania Delivery

Contact information for presenters• Jean-François Ameye

jean-francois.ameye@ixiasoft.com

• Kristen James Eberleinkris@eberleinconsulting.com

• George Christian Binageorge@oxygenxml.com

• Joe Gollnerjag@gnostyx.com

• Eliot Kimberekimber@contrext.com

Back-up slides

Example of a specialization: DITA source

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE faq PUBLIC "-//EXAMPLE//DTD DITA FAQ//EN" "faq.dtd"><faq id=" kom1478229506342" xml:lang="en-us">

<question>How do I change the size of the node icons?</question>

<answer>To decrease the node size, press <uicontrol>Ctrl+[</uicontrol>.

To increase the node size, press <uicontrol>Ctrl+]</uicontrol>.

</answer>

</faq>

Example specialization: Generalized DITA<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE concept PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Concept//EN" “concept.dtd"><concept id="kom1478229506342" xml:lang="en-us"

class="- topic/topic concept/concept faq/faq “ >

<title class="- topic/title faq/question ">How do I change the size of the node icons?</title>

To decrease the node size, press <uicontrol>Ctrl+[</uicontrol>.

To increase the node size, press <uicontrol>Ctrl+]</uicontrol>.

</conbody></concept>

DITA Interoperability

Technology