by Diane Wieland, DCL News Editorial
As organizations around the globe begin examining the benefits of content standards, they often find that moving to a standard approach involves adopting a variety of standards and finding ways to make them work together to achieve critical business goals. Finding ways to cooperatively use widely accepted standards such as S1000D,DITA, and SCORM can help fill the gaps left by one or the other and offer frameworks that minimizes the impact of change. There has been some interest in bridging the gap between S1000D and DITA in the aerospace industry, but the latest spark of interest in S1000D-DITA interoperability seemed to emerge in two places at once. The S1000D-SCORM Testbed, and private sector experts appear to have had simultaneous "Eureka! moments" that have led to the first ever S1000D-DITA Training and Learning Subcommittee Summit and an OASIS sponsored DITA-S1000D discussion group. (Notice the switch in acronyms?) SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) is an XML-based framework used to define and access information about learning objects so they can be easily shared among different learning management systems. The S1000D-SCORM Testbed is the responsibility of Tim Tate, Director of the Advanced Distributed Learning Job Performance Technology Center. As director of JPTC, his task is to look for ways public and private sector organizations can improve job performance by sharing technology research, development, implementation and evaluations. Because DITA already works well with SCORM, and the Testbed project has found ways for S1000D to work with SCORM (in theory at least) it leads to the possibility that all three of these standards could soon be working together to build the best sources of shareable, dynamic content for technical and learning materials.
As organizations around the globe begin examining the benefits of content standards, they often find that moving to a standard approach involves adopting a variety of standards and finding ways to make them work together to achieve critical business goals. Finding ways to cooperatively use widely accepted standards such as S1000D,DITA, and SCORM can help fill the gaps left by one or the other and offer frameworks that minimizes the impact of change. There has been some interest in bridging the gap between S1000D and DITA in the aerospace industry, but the latest spark of interest in S1000D-DITA interoperability seemed to emerge in two places at once. The S1000D-SCORM Testbed, and private sector experts appear to have had simultaneous "Eureka! moments" that have led to the first ever S1000D-DITA Training and Learning Subcommittee Summit and an OASIS sponsored DITA-S1000D discussion group. (Notice the switch in acronyms?) SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) is an XML-based framework used to define and access information about learning objects so they can be easily shared among different learning management systems. The S1000D-SCORM Testbed is the responsibility of Tim Tate, Director of the Advanced Distributed Learning Job Performance Technology Center. As director of JPTC, his task is to look for ways public and private sector organizations can improve job performance by sharing technology research, development, implementation and evaluations. Because DITA already works well with SCORM, and the Testbed project has found ways for S1000D to work with SCORM (in theory at least) it leads to the possibility that all three of these standards could soon be working together to build the best sources of shareable, dynamic content for technical and learning materials.
