There's a pilot project out of Lotus using DITA for dynamic content publishing, and you can also see the DITA source for any of the content in the project. You can search DITA source and return maps and topics. You can turn a search result list into a map that you can publish as HTML or PDF, or you can use a shopping cart mode to select content from multiple searches and create a more custom map for publishing to PDF or HTML.

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I'll be teaching a course remotely through UCSC starting in February - details are here:

http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/ucsc/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do;j...

To summarize:

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Just checking in from LavaCon in New Orleans. Have mostly recovered from the soul-scarring sights on Bourbon Street last night, and am finishing the first day of the conference listening to Robert Anderson demonstrate specialization. It's rude of me to be blogging while he presents, but I kinda know this part :-)

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The conference finished off with a number of DITA case studies, from BusinessObjects, RIM, and PTC.

I highly recommend Larissa Sliwinsky's "Real-World DITA" case study on usage at Business Objects (ppt available from the STC session materials site). The business driver was customer complaints about lack of information, out-of-date information: as someone with a background in user assistance, it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy when someone chooses DITA to improve their customer experience/information quality, instead of focusing solely on its reuse benefits.

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Day 3 kicked off with the DITA TC meeting, phoning in from my hotel room - we completed our disposition of features for 1.2 versus 1.3, and approved the creation of a new Semiconductor subcommittee, led by Bob Beims of Freescale. I know this has been in the makings for quite some time, kudos to Bob for pulling it together.

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