DITA Europe Conference 2009 Abstracts

Conference Program Abstracts 2009

Collaboration Via Reuse: Are we there yet?
Don Bridges – Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc.

Many organizations are looking at DITA technology to foster collaboration by using reusable 'chunks' of information across the organization. DITA offers an efficient foundation to enable collaboration by reusable content. But while there is technology to facilitate this, your content, your architecture, your organization, and your management probably aren’t ready. Bridging silos of information and developing a clear content strategy are key aspects of making sure that the right information is always presented. This session examines micro (human-based) and macro (computer-based) approaches to understanding content reuse to get your system and your management on-board. Best practices for designing for effective reuse and helping the organization to move towards true collaboration will be provided.

This session provides the attendee with an overview of micro and macro content analysis and address:

What is reuse and what are the benefits?

How to analyze your content for reuse

Architecting your content for an effective content strategy

Best Practices for bridging information silos and gaining support

Controlled Language: How standardizing on content saves (translation) cost and improves multilingual readability
Berry Braster – Tedopres International, Inc.

Controlled authoring (also known as Simplified Technical English) is a method of writing that makes technical English easy to understand. The adaptation of a controlled language stimulates the (global) acceptance of technical documentation because it improves readability and translatability and prevents misunderstandings and misinterpretations. In addition, controlled language facilitates DITA, XML, and content management thanks to a considerable increase in content reuse.

During this session, content-quality advocate Berry explains the benefits of controlled authoring using case studies and shows how overall cost, time to market, and content volume will be reduced and how you can save considerably on translations: up to 40% per language!

Dating DITA: Examining the DITA structure with a semantic eye
Ralf Steiner – Open Text GmbH

Judging from the publications, conferences, websites, and blogs, the DITA method seems to be THE answer to all documentation problems—especially when it comes to software. So a small team of tech writers at Open Text turned their attention to what seemed the ideal solution for a software company in dire need of a new structure. However, coming from an existing XML-based system and choosing a strictly semantic approach, we concentrated on the feature probably most important to the actual author: the DITA structure. With this presentation, we aim to show you what we found out about structuring and writing when we were dating the much acclaimed DITA.

Delivering User Documentation in New and Dynamic Ways
Mark Poston – Mekon Ltd.

Whilst content management and authoring are essential to the creation of any technical publication, the benefit an end user can realise is the ultimate aim. This presentation focuses on how new XML-related developments, such as XML native databases and XQuery, can be used to create more engaging deliverables for end users.

Using relevant examples, Mark shows not only how these new developments provide a more efficient means of publishing content but also how content can be delivered in ways that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.

DITA 1.2 Panel
JoAnn Hackos – Comtech Services, Inc.
Kristen James Eberlein – Independent
Briana Wherry – Alfresco Software, Inc.
Robin Sloan – PTC
Chris Kravogel – SeicoDyne GmbH
Hal Trent – Comtech Services, Inc.

Join members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and the OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee for a high-level, user-friendly explanation of what's going to be in the DITA 1.2 release. We focus on trying to answer the question in most people's minds, "What's going to be in it for me or my company?" Some of topics that we will cover include the new keyref mechanism, extensions to conref, and the Machine Industry task. The audience will be given ample opportunity to ask questions.

DITA and Authoring Software
Sissi Closs – Comet Computer GmbH
Robert Hinesley – Comet Computer GmbH

In our talk, we present how known authoring tools support DITA today. The following tools will be compared:

Author-it

Flare

FrameMaker together with RoboHelp

We summarize the experience we had with these tools and answer frequently asked questions.

DITA EDEN (Electronic Documentation Essential Norm): Simplifying DITA
Elliot Nedas – XML-INTL

Although DITA is a very sophisticated and extensible approach to component-based publishing, it contains many aspects that add significantly to the cost of implementation. In fact, it is a prime example of the 80/20 rule. The vast majority (80%) of potential implementors have no need for the features which make DITA expensive to design and implement and account for 80% of the development effort. DITA EDEN is a stripped down fully compatible subset of DITA that is ideal for the vast majority of potential users. It concentrates on the core aspects of what users actually need and not what architects think that they should have. DITA EDEN is also much easier/cheaper to implement and is similar to SGML and XML.

DITA Productivity Killers
Frank Miller – Comtech Services, Inc.

During a DITA implementation and sometimes even after, organizations find themselves asking, "Why did we bother to move to DITA?". That is because DITA contains several potential traps and pitfalls which, if not addressed, can cripple productivity and make the old desktop publishing environment feel like a more productive, less-costly place to be.

In this presentation, Frank highlights some commonly problematic areas of a DITA production environment, including conditions run amok, gaps in training, collaboration failures, overreliance on tools, and process bottlenecks. Real-world examples demonstrate the significance of each potential productivity drain. Frank presents solutions for tackling the problems upfront, rather than too late.

DITA to XLIFF and Back: Understanding the technical solution
Bryan Schnabel – Tektronix, Inc.
Rodolfo M. Raya – Maxprograms

XLIFF provides an easy-to-use mechanism for packaging DITA files for translation and localization providers. The first part of the presentation carefully explains DITA’s architecture, XLIFF’s method of encapsulating and managing localization material, and why the two open standards are so suited for one another. Then a real world 'end-to-end' enterprise implementation is demonstrated. Two equally viable approaches are shown. Bryan will demonstrate the lightweight, completely open source approach, using only his DITA-XLIFF RoundTrip Tool. Then Rodolfo will show a more robust approach using Swordfish.

Do You Think OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) when Writing Topics?
Gunnar H. Krause – Areva NP GmbH

For many years object-oriented programming (OOP) has been an established technique to plan and build software that is reusable, extensible, and of good quality. The principles used in OOP are called modularity, inheritance, information hiding, data abstraction, and composition, to name a few. The writing of software engineers can be seen in DITA fundamentals when thinking of modularity and inheritance. Because most technical authors have no degree in computer science, you may not have evaluated the options of OOP paradigms in defining your modularization strategy. If your documents describe related products or services this session will broaden your horizon. Gunnar introduced DITA to the external and internal documentation of semiconductor products while programming software with OOP. Of course, there are always multiple possible ways to achieve the same set of documents. However, writers tend to reuse the familiar techniques learned from Desktop Publishing tools with DITA—instead of diving into the universe of modular objects. Are you open-minded?

Dutch Railway Maintenance with DITA on the Right Track
Birgit Strackenbrock – iCtrl

Consistent and up-to-date maintenance instructions are crucial for any organization that is responsible for machine maintenance. To reach this goal, you need excellent authors, input from experts, high-qualified editors, and a technical environment which supports them with their tasks.

The concept and structures of DITA offer a perfect base to build such an environment. But even for excellent technical writers, it is difficult to think and write individual topics. Moreover, experts like to review a whole maintenance instruction and not lose parts of it. On the other hand, after the creation of the instructions it is essential to prevent redundancy and make reuse possible. Furthermore, good versioning control will be needed.

This case study describes how the DITA standard is specialized and used to meet the needs of NedTrain to create and maintain more than 3.000 maintenance instructions. It also covers the technologies that are used to implement the solution—including XML Mind XML-editor, a special web portal, Subversion, and TCToolbox. Our solution includes the following:

writers are supplied with a fully customized XML-editor for authoring composite topics

experts can download PDFs for review from a special project website

and editors can easily maintain and manage content in an exquisite content management system

Effective Documentation through a Global Team of Information Developers
Kristina Brinck – ITT Fluid Technology

The corporate Global Enterprise Content Management (GECM) system aims to reuse information among several companies within ITT in Europe and in the USA. This demands that all information developers are on the same platform:

Everyone must understand the different roles, responsibilities, and authorities, and how to communicate in order to get the documentation process working effectively.

Everyone must understand and follow the common guidelines for how to analyze, structure, and present information to get comprehensive and reusable content with reduced translation costs.

For this purpose, the information developers have regular WebEx meetings, where they

get training and contribute to knowledge transfer to their fellow information developers

solve common problems

provide feedback on and contribute to improvements of the GECM system

This presentation gives examples of how the team of GECM information developers works in practice and the impact it has on documentation effectiveness.

Ensuring Consistency with Map and Topic Templates
Julia Malkin – Endeca Technologies

DITA has a well-defined structure for the basic topic types, but the variety of elements can still be confusing for writers new to DITA. Early in our implementation, we helped writers get the hang of the basics and conform to our in-house standards at the same time by developing self-documenting topic templates for DITA topics that showed the most commonly used markup for tasks, concepts, and reference material.

Further along in our DITA journey, as we refined our standards for ditamap structures, we developed a set of map templates that writers could use to create new deliverables from scratch. These templates included small, modular content-unit maps that were nested inside other maps to build both online and PDF deliverables. This approach enabled the modular reuse of maps and also drove several of our practices around reltables and linking.

Finally, we supplemented our basic templates with more specialized sets of templates for well-known and recurring scenarios such as installation or migration documentation.

In this session, we share our process for developing templates and our internal DITA procedures guide. We show how we rolled them out across the entire team.

Exploring the Use of DITA Learning Content for Generating Training Materials in International Development
Thomas Zschocke – United Nations University

International organizations engaged in human capacity building for development generate many different types of technical documentation and training materials for a variety of audiences, often across different languages. The challenge for these organizations is to more easily reuse their content not only from one of their units to another, but also to reuse content components among different organizations. DITA provides the means to achieve this reuse for technical documentation, but also to reuse the technical documentation elements in learning content. The concept equally applies to reuse of content materials of the United Nations University (UNU) and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). In a joint effort, the UNU and the CGIAR are currently exploring the use of DITA to enhance the development and delivery of their training materials for national partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This presentation reflects on the initial experiences and challenges of adapting DITA to convert existing learning content as well as to incorporate content from other organizations such as the UNU into the learning resource base of the CGIAR.

Geeks Don't Sell DITA
Jang F.M. Graat – JANG Communication

Most introductions to DITA today talk to the tech writer and explain the principles and techniques in technological terms. But the tech writers do not have the power to adopt DITA in their companies: they must get the budget from their managers, who very often have no idea about XML, XSLT, HTML, etc. If an introduction to DITA cannot rephrase the concepts in terms that the managers do understand, DITA is not going to be successful in an area where it can yield its best results: the huge area of small machine manufacturing businesses. This presentation explains why selling DITA via technology-oriented talk does not work and what needs to be changed in DITA introductions to convince managers that their investment in DITA projects is going to pay off.

Generation of XML-DITA Procedures from Use Case Detection in Informal Technical Documents
Michel Lanque – Alcatel-Lucent
Philippe Larvet – Independent

Within the context of technical documentation, this presentation focuses on an automated process for detecting the structure of use cases within technical specifications and for generating procedures in XML, in conformity with the DITA standard. XML-DITA procedures are small, reusable documentation blocks. They are stored in a specific directory and are directly usable to build well-structured customer documentation. Beyond the old manual approach, this process is proposed to help technical document writers (System and Development teams, documentation writing teams, etc.) to build reusable procedures from the contents of technical specifications. The proposed process helps to keep costs under control to deliver well-structured content to customers.

How Effective Use of Metadata and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Can Be an Answer to Your
DITA Nightmares
Frank Shipley – Componize Software

Many challenges face authors and organizations moving to DITA. Some of those challenges may not jump out at you at first. Soon you will be faced with problems that may stop you from sleeping peacefully at night.

For example, breaking your content into small modular topics is great for reuse, but could easily multiply by 10 or even a 100 the numbers of files you have to manage. Finding information in this "sea of content" can be a grueling task! Another example is links. In your DITA content, you will have links everywhere. Maps contain links to topics. Topics may have links to images, cross references to other topics, related links, and conrefs. Soon, you may not know what content is being used where, you may not even know what content is being used at all!

These are just two examples of the many practical challenges you will be faced with as an author and as an organization. During the presentation, we will see how the effective use of metadata along with existing standards such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) can be an answer to those challenges. With metadata and RDF, those nasty nightmares will go away, indeed they may well be the answer to all of your DITA dreams!

Hybrid DITA Content
Steffen Frederiksen – Content Technologies ApS

Many challenges face authors and organizations moving to DITA. Some of those challenges may not jump out at you at first. Soon you will be faced with problems that may stop you from sleeping peacefully at night.

This presentation is about making DITA a real, viable business solution, for example in the pharmaceutical industry, by adding to the "gene pool". In biology, "hybrid" means the offspring resulting from cross-breeding of different plants or animals.

We use the term "Hybrid DITA Content" to mean: "Content (e.g., a DITA map) that combines standard DITA XML topics and maps with non-DITA and/or non-XML components. The same DITA metadata architecture would be used for both the DITA components and the non-DITA components.The non-DITA components could be legacy PDF documents or standard business documents (Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.).

Hybrid DITA content would typically be presented in an appropriate online reader but could also be used for dead-wood publishing (paper, PDF).”

An incredible number of companies feel a strong attraction towards DITA and the huge potential benefits of cost savings and quality improvements in connection with documentation and communication in general. However, a large part of these companies stall when they get close enough to be able to actually look down into the “DITA Gap.”

The “DITA Gap” is defined by all the things you have to do BEFORE you can make DITA work:

Everybody has to get DITA training of some sort

New (maybe expensive) tools and methods will be needed

New processes to implement

Possibly a new CMS solution to implement and worst of all

An awful lot of legacy documents to convert to DITA, before actual production can start

This presentation outlines the problem—what is it that scares companies away from DITA—and then moves on to describe at least one possible bridge across the abyss: Hybrid DITA content. Live examples that use hybrid DITA content will be shown.

Implementing DITA in Phases: Out of the frying pan and into the fire?
Briana Wherry – Alfresco Software, Inc.
Janys Kobernick – Alfresco Software, Inc.

Alfresco Software Inc. is the open source alternative to Enterprise Content Management. Alfresco produces documentation for a number of different audiences including the open source community, enterprise customers, and partners who integrate Alfresco into their products. Alfresco is a mid-sized software company who has adopted professional documentation standards. Two years ago, the Documentation department transitioned to DITA and experienced all the challenges and growing pains associated with this new paradigm shift.

Now, in Phase 3 of the DITA implementation, the Documentation team confronts an entirely new set of challenges—ones that stretch recently acquired skills and knowledge even further. Expectations in this phase have increased with expansion into information sharing with other internal teams and external partners. This includes incorporating additional DITA customizations, improving the systems, and developing workflow processes to produce, maintain, and expand the documentation to achieve the maximum effect in the expanded environment.

This presentation includes:

Phase 1

How the Documentation team transitioned to DITA

How the overall documentation process and responsibilities of team members changed

Phase 2

Rewriting content to achieve reuse

Rebuilding information architecture to support reusability

Defining formal standards, processes, and guidelines

Phase 3

Where do we go from here?

Expectations versus reality

Introduction to CSS3 for Print Design and for DITA
Michael Miller – Antenna House, Inc.

Why is this important? XSL-FO has traditionally been used for formatting XML for print and PDF. For web design, CSS has been used. For companies that need to produce both print and web from their XML, this means using one stylesheet language for web design and another language or tool for print design. CSS3 offers the necessary functionality to enable for the first time the use of one stylesheet language and stylesheet to meet the need for both web and print. This presentation will look at the functions specified in CSS2.1 and CSS3 that make document production using CSS a reality. This presentation includes these topics:

Introduction

What makes a document

Using CSS to design a document for print and PDF

Look at current products that support CSS for print design

Questions and answers

Key Steps for Making DITA Successful in an Agile Environment
Frank Closset – SDL XySoft
Henrik Evanth – Sony Ericsson Mobile

The documentation group at Sony Ericsson is responsible for creating all end user documentation targeted for global markets, covering processes from authoring to translation, to deliver the right information for diverse global audiences. With a successful business case based on single sourcing as a “first principle,” Sony Ericsson is able to release many new models to the market each year and translate documentation in over 65 different languages. With the need to make last-minute changes to keep their competitive edge, Sony Ericsson carefully designed a set of best practices to create highly modular, reusable, and translatable documentation. Attend this session to learn how Sony Ericsson is aligning global content practices with the company’s business goals and objectives.

Making DITA Work
Joe Gollner – Stilo International

A number of organizations have made initial investments in DITA with a view to modernizing how documentation within their organization is managed, reused, and deployed. It is for good reason that these organizations have turned to DITA as there are undeniable benefits to be gained by coordinating these modernization efforts with those other organizations and with those of the technology providers that support this marketplace. Among the great attractions of DITA is its ability to help organizations make rapid progress by adopting and adapting models, authoring strategies, and publishing processes that already exist and that have a solid pedigree behind them. Once these initial exploratory investments, often taking the form of pilot projects, have been made, many of these same organizations encounter challenges as they attempt to shift from the exploratory mode towards one geared to implementing a new environment for creating, managing, and publishing content assets. These new environments must be able to shoulder the weight of production demands and therefore this transition from exploration to operation can be a very challenging one. These new environment must be able to shoulder the weight of production demands, and therefore, this transition from exploration to operation can be a very challenging one. Several of these challenges are technical in nature and pertain to the ability of the environment to sustain production-level publishing demands. Other challenges are related directly to business considerations surrounding the timeframes within which benefits can be realized and the ways in which change, both technical and business, can be managed. Based on numerous past and present DITA projects that have specifically focused on addressing these challenges, this presentation will provide attendees with real-world insights into what implementation challenges require attention and what practical steps can be taken to address them.

Nuts and Bolts of the DITA Open Toolkit
Aliza Merzel – Suite Solutions

The DITA Open Toolkit is currently the de facto backbone for generating output from DITA content. This pragmatic presentation gives you the basics to understand and start working with the toolkit. The points to be covered include:

Overview of toolkit components

Installing and running the toolkit

Generating different outputs using transtypes

Filtering output using DITAVAL

Using the toolkit with Antenna House and RenderX

Common errors and mistakes

Where to go for support: Online resources

Small Steps, Big Thoughts: Get started with DITA
Søren Weimann – Motorola A/S

You know what DITA and XML are about. You believe it will be beneficial for your documentation. You have no clue as to how to start! At Motorola—Government and Public Safety, we have piloted DITA on a small project and achieved 25% reuse plus an additional delivery format. This presentation will demonstrate how we got started and why we decided to take small steps. Søren shares how Motorola evaluated the existing documentation, designed the new content model, created stylesheets, got the draft deliverables reviewed and approved, and set a plan for the future—more projects, broader reuse strategy, and CMS implementation.

The Challenges and Benefits of Guiding Non-Technical Authors through DITA
Laurens van den Oever – Xopus
Ian Larner – IBM Corporation

DITA comes with many benefits, but creating valid DITA content and getting the right text in the right tags can be hard. Visually oriented authors are less likely to form a mental model of the underlying document structures. This is relevant today as DITA specializations like Learning and Training move DITA outside the scope of trained technical writers.

We will show approaches to have non-technical authors directly write DITA content including improving discovery of available tags, preventing abuse of tags for styling, and promotion of inline tagging.

Enabling business users to create DITA content opens a wide range of new use cases. We will discuss how DITA's typical benefits like content reuse and referencing can be leveraged for compliancy, policy, and contract management.

Transforming DITA
Hal Trent – Comtech Services, Inc.

In this presentation, Hal demonstrates the importance of XML tagging in creating audience-specific documentation in a cost-effective environment. He discusses a series of use cases where XML tagging has played an important role in meeting timely deadlines by just having the information structured in XML. In this session, you will learn how using XML tagging to semantically structure your information will allow you to leverage your XSLT to create specific document output. You will also gain the technical knowledge necessary to understand the difference between filtering your documentation using conditional processing versus filtering your documentation at the transform.

Ugly DITA
Sheila D'Annunzio – STMicroelectronics
Marc Speyer – Independent

If used properly, DITA is a powerful, comprehensive, and flexible standard that allows organizations to better use and reuse their structured content—and reduce costs in the process. But the comprehensiveness and flexibility of DITA can easily result in ugly DITA and a frustrated experience. In this presentation, Sheila and Marc share their recommendations from a DITA pilot project undertaken at STMicroelectronics. Sheila and Marc provide valuable insight in how to avoid and overcome problems resulting from the DITA content model, stumbling blocks in content reuse, unexpected print quality issues, adoption resistance, and implementation difficulties.

User, Reuse, and Product Structure in One Box: How to combine effective information reuse, user, and product management requirements using DITA
Kweku Essuon – Citec Information

Kweku highlights the DITA-based solution that enables Wärtsilä to satisfy end-user requirements and ensure that the multi-level product structure renders correctly in their deliverables. This presentation presents best practices for delivering customized information based on reusable, modular documentation that is explicitly mapped to product structure. Come see how a high level of reuse provides the business case for a DITA solution and learn about the pros and cons of using DITA.

Using DITA for Requirements Traceability in Model-Driven Pharmacovigilance
Matthew Brandabur – Ward Street Partners

Facing an absolute need for the end-to-end traceability of requirements from analysis to code, the development project team agreed to consider piloting a set of key design artifacts in DITA using a simple set of templates developed in Oxygen.

After the potential cost of high-end Commercial Off The Shelf Software (COTS) requirements tracking tools was deemed prohibitive, DITA was introduced as a flexible, configurable, pay-as-you-go solution befitting the iterative and incremental approach taken by this cutting-edge Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) startup.

Beginning with Use Cases and a simple nomenclature, DITA is now being used to provide end-to-end traceability of requirements from analysis to testing. Special consideration was given to the import-by-reference capabilities of DITA, as well as the ability to render multiple versions of a single document set with varying degrees of granularity.

The barriers to adoption among key team members for DITA were not significantly greater than those for the project team wiki, and the control and flexibility provided by the DITA framework showed themselves readily.

Because publication was relatively straightforward, not a lot of time was needed for PDF-generation problems that seem to plague so many other DITA efforts. The ability to demonstrate progress from a simple prototype was useful in dispelling doubts as to the merits of the DITA approach.

The usefulness of other key features of DITA such as typed topics, extensibility, and granular content reuse, is being explored with regard to project requirements traceability, and will be discussed in this presentation.

Background: Basel-based ii4sm (International Institute for the Safety of Medicines) is one of two entities (the other being the US National Cancer Institute) piloting an overall development methodology developed by members of HL7's (Health Level 7, www.h17.org) Architecture Review Board, the prospect of DITA's usefulness in tracking requirements throughout the lifecycle of a project is of considerable interest to a potentially large and specialized audience in the global field of health care informatics. The SAEAF (Services Aware Enterprise Architecture Framework) is meant to answer the question "How should services and other instances of Interoperability Paradigm artifacts, e.g. messages and documents —be defined, specified, implemented, and governed within HL7?”

Using Global Delivery for Knowledge Intensive Systems
Werner Knudsen – IBM Corporation

In today's financial climate, companies are focused on cost-effectiveness, leading them to examine the possibility of minimizing expenses for IT development, maintenance, and support by incorporating offshore resources into the IT teams. Knowledge-intensive web systems, e.g., Portals and intranets, demand additional considerations because of their socio-cultural and linguistic characteristics. How do we assess whether our company is ready for working with offshore resources? How do we make strategic decisions to balance the potential cost savings against the impact of cultural and linguistic challenges due to the use of Global Delivery? And how do we avoid pitfalls and create a successful global team? The speech draws on actual experiences, best practises, and research results.

WinANT: Simplifying and Automating DITA Publishing
Tony Self – HyperWrite Pty. Ltd.

With the DITA Open Toolkit (OT), transforming a collection of DITA topics into a deliverable format such as PDF is not a simple, one-step technical process. The transformation process, or the build, involves multiple passes of the source files to generate links, resolve conrefs, create intermediate files, and compile or assemble the publication. Although there are a few approaches, the author will generally need to write a "build file" and then process that build file using Apache Ant. This involves hand-crafting the XML build file and typing and executing an esoteric command line.

WinANT Echidna is a Windows interface to the DITA OT publishing functionality. It allows the author to select the many build options in a familiar Windows interface, browse for the ditamap to be processed, set conditional processing rules, and initiate the Ant build. The build configuration can be saved for later retrieval, and the build files generated can be used to set up an automatic publishing schedule. Diagnostic utilities also help users rectify problems with their DITA OT installation. In this session, WinANT's developer demonstrates this open source tool and describes the ways it can be "fine-tuned" to streamline DITA publishing.