IBM, ISIS Papyrus America, Microsoft, and Adobe, Boeing, Cisco, Citrix, Comtech, Intel, Nokia, Oracle, PTC, Quark, SAP, SDL, US Department of Defense, U.S. Veterans Health Administration, and Others Advance Open Standard for Content Reuse and Multi-Channel Delivery

The OASIS open standards consortium announced that its members have approved DITA version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. DITA defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing many kinds of information in print and on the Web. DITA is widely used for books, technical manuals, help files, training, and multimedia authoring because of its modular, topic-based approach and its ability to support content reuse. DITA 1.2 is now an official OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.

DITA 1.2 defines a set of document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information as well as a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types. Other features include a new Learning and Training Specialization, which provides support for educational applications, and a Hazard Statement and Machinery Task Specialization, which makes DITA extremely useful for machinery documentation.

"This new version of DITA incorporates community suggestions that will help content developers create and deliver more kinds of information in more ways than ever," said Don Day, chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. "The constraints mechanism can be used to remove unneeded tags from the authoring environment, depending on the type of document. Managing and reusing content is more efficient with indirect 'keyref' addressing using user-defined keys, and with extensions to conref, such as pushing updates into already published content."

"Many vendors have already updated their products to support DITA 1.2, and several organizations have begun authoring in the new version and taking advantage of its advanced features," noted OASIS DITA Adoption Committee co-chairs, Gershon Joseph of Cisco and JoAnn Hackos of Comtech.

Participation in the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and the DITA Adoption Committee is open to all companies, non-profit groups, governments, academic institutions, and individuals. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committees' work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mailing list for public comment.

Support for DITA 1.2

Comtech Services
"As an enthusiastic promoter of the DITA standard globally, I am pleased that the OASIS community has demonstrated its support for DITA 1.2. Comtech Services looks forward to bringing the additions and improvements in the specification to the attention of technical publications professionals and others engaged in the development of useful and usable information. DITA 1.2 promises to contribute to the already impressive productivity gains and cost savings that the DITA standard has enabled since its original approval in 2004. Thanks to the DITA community for the hard work that went into its development and release." -- JoAnn Hackos, president, Comtech

IBM
"From its inception, DITA has been a central part of IBM's content strategy. As our strategy evolves, DITA does with it, bringing new classification capabilities and enhanced reuse that provide a better content experience for both our authors and our customers. DITA 1.2 gives us the ability to develop new capabilities like dynamic publishing and personalization without compromising our existing enterprise processes and requirements. Many features of DITA 1.2 are already well validated in use at IBM, and it continues to grow into new areas and applications, providing the common denominator for semantic content across the enterprise." -- Eileen Jones, Director, IBM Corporation Information Development and Information Quality Executive

Nokia
"Nokia is pleased with the standardization of DITA 1.2. The DITA information architecture plays a key role in supporting content exchange, and the new features in DITA 1.2 further enable single-sourcing and reuse of content." -- Frederick Hirsch, Senior Architect at Nokia

Oracle
"Leading edge companies from around the world have embraced DITA for large scale, topic-oriented content. DITA 1.2 represents the next evolutionary link in information typing for modern systems. It is a more flexible, powerful and pervasive solution for enterprise content to help users significantly drive down the cost of content development and translation." -- Don Deutsch, vice president Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle

PTC
"PTC welcomes the new DITA 1.2 standard, which offers additional content flexibility and robust support for reuse. DITA 1.2 opens the door to the use of key references, streamlining specializations and implementing a powerful Learning and Training solution. It's exciting for PTC to continue influencing and shaping a standard that is widely used by so many diverse customers and industries." -- Mike Sundquist, vice president product management, PTC

SAP
"DITA 1.2, containing the learning and training elements, supports the requirements for industrialized knowledge transfer content production at SAP. The DITA content architecture provides us with the standardization and flexibility to efficiently produce and deliver for our customers multi-modular and multi-modal training content in several languages. At the same time, it enables us to scale content production with our partner ecosystem. We continue to actively participate in the OASIS DITA Technical Committee to further evolve this standard to also serve future upcoming challenges, such as collaborative and mobile learning approaches." -- Kurt Bauer, senior vice president of Knowledge Productization Services, SAP Education

SDL
"SDL has seen rapid adoption of DITA and SDL's Component Content Management system over the past few years by companies focused on global markets. DITA 1.2 promises to deliver even more ROI and help move DITA beyond technical publications into other parts of the organization. SDL Trisoft 2011, which was released this past September, already contains robust support for the new DITA 1.2 standard." -- Kristen Eberlein, SDL's DITA architect