DITA at the XML 2007 Conference

The IdeaAlliance XML 2007 Conference theme was "XML in Practice". XML 2007 featured a Documents and Publishing Track, with important presentations on DITA, as a fine example of XML in practice.

The opening presentation, by Eric Severson of Flatiron Solutions, argued that DITA is taking the world by storm (PPT). Entitled "Practical Lessons for DITA Implementation," Severson had an excellent slide that compared DITA to DocBook, showing how topics are assembled by maps and DocBook is a monolithic document.

Eliot Kimber of Really Strategies reported on the conversion of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rules and regulations to DITA. The Financial Accounting Foundation (mandated by government but supported by industry and sales of regulations to publishers) wanted to produce a new codification of the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, for which a DITA-based but highly specialized XML application was developed. FASB knew they wanted to go to XML. They considered DocBook and some other mature standards. They considered a custom XML development, which Kimber had done many times in his career and knew would be very costly and time consuming. But they settled on DITA, for cost reasons and because DITA met requirements better than the alternatives.

Kimber did the overall design and the specializations needed. One or two FASB staff worked on it, and a small team at Ovitas provided the dynamic delivery from their business process portal backed by the e:CLS (empolis) CMS. Tibor Tscheke reported on the work at Ovitas (PPT). The authoring tool was PTC Arbortext Editor. This portal will provide updates to publishers in XML. FASB soon will offer a new public-facing web information portal, generated from the original DITA topics, using a Fatwire Content Server and Oracle XDB database.

John Hunt of IBM reported on the work of his OASIS subcommittee on Learning and Training Content Specialization.

Eliot Kimber than led an all-afternoon DITA Quick Start training session. We videotaped a large part of this tutorial and will post it on ditausers.org/tutorials.

Several attendees contributed conference writeups and comments.

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