The purpose of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (DITA TC) is to define and maintain the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and to promote the use of the architecture for creating standard information types and domain-specific markup vocabularies.
Review the list of organizations that participate in the DITA TC.
Everyone is welcome to join the DITA TC. If you are employed by an existing OASIS member, you can go directly to the DITA TC web site and click on Join This TC. If your employer is not currently an OASIS member, you can find out how to become involved at Join OASIS.
The current work of the DITA TC is made visible through e-mail archives and a TC wiki. A consolidated zip file with all specifications, DTDs, and Schemas for DITA 1.1 is publicly available at dita1.1.zip.
The DITA TC home page also includes links to the public sites for the current subcommittees. All subcommittees operating under the DITA TC are listed on the OASIS DITA TC home page. More information is available about -OASIS DITA TC specialization subcommittees-.
Users may be interested in the mailing lists and additional information listed on the DITA TC web site.
This page contains information about the work of the OASIS DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization Subcommittee (at http://www.oasis-open.org).
See also:
Creating DITA specializations for better information design and interoperability throughout the semiconductor industry.
This subcommittee represents a community of interest within various semiconductor companies who believe that there is value in creating a DITA specialization for the industry. Not only will this enable better integration with the development of the OASIS DITA Standard, but will provide an opportunity for
NOTE: Version 1.3 was released in 2006. This information should no longer be considered up to date. Up to date information on the toolkit can be found here: The DITA Open Toolkit
The next major release (1.3) of the DITA Open Toolkit is being evaluated for scope and schedule. The project team has been tracking requirements coming from the OASIS DITA TC, the dita-users support forum, and among the dita-ot developer community discussions. The open requirements are listed below. The purpose of this document is to host separate design discussions for each of these items. Out of these discussions, the project team will assess the relative priorities and available resource (contributors and code, for example) that can be applied to the proposed schedule.
Task_Name, Duration, Start, Finish
Coding, 1 Month, start of July, around 06-8-10
Test Execution, ~ 1 Month, Mid July, around 06-8-22
Release Prep, ~ 1.5 weeks, around 06-8-23, end of August
Release, , end of August, end of August
Don Day, DITA OT Team Lead
Tentative schedule:
Design discussions for the proposed items (tentative list) are here:
1. Support for DITA 1.1/bookmap (stakeholders: OASIS DITA TC and popular community request)
2. Eclipse integration (stakeholders: community and dev team)
3. Incremental builds (stakeholders: advanced users, dita-ot developers)--Deferred to 1.4 to gather more case studies, understand requirements better.
4. GUI/usability (stakeholders: dita-user community, loudly heard at recent DITA conferences)--Revised to focus first on installability, defer GUI to related projects (much as editor vendors provide their own GUIs, in effect).
5. Fix topicmerge (stakeholders: dev team, judged to be strategic and a necessary base for the new bookmap support)
6. Fix indexing (stakeholders: known lack of full support for all users, languages)
7. Fully enable the XML catalog resolver (stakeholders: )
8. Ant refactoring (stakeholders: dev team, judged to be strategic for toolkit maintenance and future plugin development)
9. Document refactoring (stakeholders: end-users, other document authors)
If you have requests for other issues that you feel are critical for 1.3, please send them to Don Day (dond at us.ibm.com) so that I can compare them with other reports. The agenda for 1.3 is already very large for an aggressive schedule, therefore I would need to understand the value and justification of any new request for the larger community in order to assess it against these that have already been identified. Thanks!
Please note that actual work on creating or revising the DITA OASIS Standard or specification must take place within the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, which operates under the open OASIS Technical Process. This process, which governs issues such as transparency, contributions, licensing, participation, and disclosure, assures that OASIS Standards remain widely available and safe to implement, produced in an open, democratic, and accountable method.
While this page is a great place to get an enhancement idea started and to encourage informal collaboration, once the idea is ready to be advanced, the discussion should move to the formal OASIS Technical Committee Process. All those who wish to participate in standards development or more closely observe this work are strongly encouraged to join OASIS. A variety of membership levels are offered to assure that everyone affected by standards may contribute to their creation.
You can also provide feedback, such as feature requests for additions or changes to the DITA specification, through the OASIS DITA Comment Form. All comments received via that form are documented and reviewed by the OASIS DITA Committee members and publicly archived.
There are two main approaches to subject classification currently being explored for future use in DITA, which this page will call the map-based approach and the metadata approach.
In the map-based approach, a taxonomy is represented using a hierarchy in a DITA map. Each member of the hierarchy is a specialization of the <topicref> element. Each <topicref> element points to a topic that describes the subject of that node of the taxonomy.
In the metadata approach, the <data> element (which is being introduced in DITA 1.1) is used to record properties. The property stated in a <data> element is considered to apply to:
When the <data> element is used within content, the property that it states is considered to apply to the directly enclosing content element. When the <data> element is used in metadata contexts, the property that it states is considered to apply to the nearest enclosing content element (such as <topic>).
Broader topics:
Related topic: Taxonomy specialization plug-in, Introduction to Specialization
The DITA TC wants to ask for additional feedback on the DITA 1.2 specification draft. The formal 60-day review is slated to close this coming Sunday, 5 September 2010.
Download the DITA 1.2 specification draft
HTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/cd03/spec/DITA1.2-spec.html (Authoritative version)
PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/cd03/spec/DITA1.2-spec.pdf
CHM: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/cd03/spec/DITA1.2-spec-chm.zip
DITA: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/cd03/spec/DITA1.2-spec.zip
How to comment on the DITA 1.2 specification draft
To comment on the draft, you need to subscribe to the dita-comment mailing list. For information about subscribing to this list, see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=dita . If you are interested in seeing comments that have already been made about the draft, you can read the dita-comment archives at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita-comment/; the comments about the draft are in directories for July 2010 (201007) and August 2010 (201008).
For more information about the status of DITA 1.2
The DITA Adoption TC has published a feature article about the status of DITA 1.2. You can download it from http://dita.xml.org/resource/dita-12-feature-article-status-update
We rely heavily on the involvement of the user community and implementors to help us drive development of the DITA standard and its documentation – please help us out!
The DITA OASIS Standard builds content reuse into the authoring process, defining an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing many kinds of information in print and on the Web.
The standard is advanced through an open process by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, a group that encourages new participation from developers and users.