Members of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee have formed a new "DITA for Technical Standards Subcommittee" to enhance DITA for use with standards development and publishing. This would enable DITA to be used as 'A Standard for Standards'. The purpose of this Subcommittee is to further the capabilities of the OASIS DITA standards to define, maintain, and promote the use of DITA for the creation, maintenance, and support of technical standards specifications.
There are thousands of technical standards -- some developed by formal standards organizations, some by informal associations, and others by individual organizations or consortia -- many of which could benefit from a common standard for the creation and publication of their technical standards specifications.
The principle benefits expected would be two fold; first a toolset that will reduce the time to develop standards, promote reuse, and greater consistency in their standards. For implementers, the benefits will be significant as well affording them a familiar common format and structure, ability to reuse content across standards, and potentially to develop their own specific implementation specifications leveraging the standards they are using.
The first effort will be to assess and define common requirements for the maintenance and publication of technical standards. This will provide the common requirements for the specific capabilities that DITA should provide.
Finally the group will create necessary enhancements to DITA standard and deliverables, including the DITA Open Toolkit with a Toolkit for Technical Specifications. Desired capabilities:
- Support reuse of technical standard content so that common elements (topics) may be reused and provide a single normative source of informational elements across multiple technical standards;
- Provide a common glossary, or set of common topics, for defining technical specifications so that within and across various standards organizations there may be relevant cross-use standards components (topics) amongst themselves;
- Provide tools to support complementary development support processes in standards production including in addition to standard creation; ballot review, ballot production, voting history, and versioning;
- Provide a ready-to-use, well designed, best-of-breed DITA toolset for maintaining and publishing various technical standards for use by technical standards development organizations (SDOs/SSOs) as well as any other organization desiring a common method for creating their technical standards and specifications, making it faster, easier and more reliable to produce technical specifications...
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