Conference Program Abstracts 2010

Acronyms and Abbreviations in DITA
David Reid – Thales
The Netherlands

This presentation explains how to mark up Acronyms and Abbreviations in DITA documents so that they can be extracted to make a "List of Abbreviations" and be checked against a "Master list" for correctness.

Often we see documents where there is an acronym or abbreviation with the same letters, but with a different description. Is it Digital Video Disc (DVD) or Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)? Having a list of the acceptable abbreviations for the documents is a first step ... then integrating this into the checking tools is the ultimate quality check.

I will explain how this is easy to achieve in DITA using the <term> tag to tag the content and doing the checking in a simple XSLT that is added to the PDF (or XHTML) output chain. The results are a "review-document" with the acronyms and abbreviations highlighted in red if they are not correct, or not in the master list. They are highighted in green if they are in the list and correctly written.

In order to switch on the checking function I will describe a mechanism that I've been using for a few years, using the contents of an attribute to control whether the checking and subsequent mark-up for the check is displayed or not. By setting the attribute to "review," the review copy is generated. Otherwise, the checking is switched off.

Likewise, the list of abbreviations is generated by setting an attribute to"LOA". If it is set, then the list is generated, if not set, then nothing is generated.

It is one of the easiest, best and most frequently used quality tools here. It ensures the authors can check their content anytime during the writing cycle and improves the efficiency and quality of the documentation creation process. As a by-product of the master list methodology, a group of webpages can be automatically created which present the abbreviations via a web-browser with an A B C...Z index so users can browse the library of terms.

We also have the mark-up in these HTML pages, so the author can simply cut and paste the correct markup, text and abbreviation directly into their documents. This saves effort and improves quality and consistency.

(Almost) Four Years On: Metrics, ROI, and other stories from a mature DITA CMS installation
Keith Schengili-Roberts – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)
Canada

AMD's Professional Graphics division has been using a DITA CMS for almost four years, and has not only been able to demonstrate effective ROI, but also how to better manage documentation processes and measure productivity. In addition to providing a more detailed bird's-eye view of the documentation process, over the past few years, AMD's Documentation & Localization Manager Keith Schengili-Roberts also had to deal with several other process issues. Some things that were not anticipated when his group first thought of implementing their DITA CMS, such as implementing a “house” DITA style guide, data-mining DITA in a CMS, conrefs vs. cloning, and ways to get Subject Matter Experts to contribute content directly into the system. Learn more as Keith talks about his experiences in managing (and measuring) the productivity of a successful DITA-based writing group.

Case Study—Tekelec's DITA Implementation
Don Bridges – Data Conversion Laboratory
Jack Gibson – Tekelec
USA

The presentation reviews a case study of Tekelec's migration from FrameMaker to DITA. This presentation will focus on the process, the business drivers (real and perceived), selling the vision to management, the timeline, the culture shift, and the future.

CMIS and DITA
Alex Griessel – DITALabs
South Africa

This technical session is targeted at information architects and knowledge workers seeking to get their hands dirty with the CMIS 1.0 standard. It will demonstrate how this standard could benefit future or existing DITA content investments and choice of content management provider.

The recent public release of the CMIS 1.0 standard has created much hype and exposed many opportunities for information architects. One such opportunity is being able to extend CMIS-aware content management systems to work with DITA content. Most CMS systems available today have native support for document and record-management, but seem to lack the support of interpreting DITA content.

This presentation will demonstrate setting up a simple PHP web client to browse a CMIS-enabled repository and render both DITA maps and topics on the fly.

Closing the Loop on the Business Case
Vikram Nanwani – ITT Fluid Technology
Sweden

In 2007, ITT embarked on its Global Enterprise Content Management program, aiming to transfer its technical documentation for the Fluid part of the business to DITA. In previous presentations at CMS conferences, we have described how we built the business case, how we have developed our processes and what we have learned along the way. We have now truly completed our first phase, including transferring and translating the documentation of our key products into DITA and run this as a core business process for a year. The time has now come to review how well we fulfilled our business plan. I will share some of our numbers, explain how we measured this and communicated it. I will also share our thoughts on what we could have done differently in terms of building the business case and monitoring the progress that might have facilitated the process of showing the benefits of the work we did. To have a very successful implementation of DITA - you need to be able to prove it!

DITA and BPMN: How to enhance Information Architecture
France Baril – Architextus
Canada

DITA is all about concepts, tasks, references and the ability to add even more topic types. It offers great opportunities, but also many traps. Is understanding the basic topic types enough to create good DITA content? How can teams split topics, write them and merge them in order to optimize both topic reuse and usability? How can teams coordinate to define information that is complete and relevant? Two of the keys are the same as ever: understanding users and understanding the subject matter. A new key is mastering coordination of the collaborative team. In the case of service industries, where most documentation is about business processes, the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) comes to the rescue by helping teams gain a better understanding of both content and audiences. With the global perspective that BPMN provides on content, DITA teams can better define the necessary topic types, and design useful relationship models. They can also better identify what information goes into which topic, and therefore who is responsible for writing what. Where does the magic come from? A picture is worth 1000 words, and BPMN is a graphical notation. Moreover, as if that wasn't enough, BPMN is an XML-based standard, which opens one door to close integration with the Information Architecture model and another one to process automation.

DITA as the Foundation for a Next Generation CMS and Publishing Process
Joe Gollner – Stilo
Canada

This case study focuses on the management and technical considerations that led to the adoption of DITA as the foundation for a Next Generation CMS and Publishing Process—and some of the steps that have been taken to turn this decision into production capabilities. One of the interesting dynamics that this case study can bring forward is that there were considerations (and challenges) on both the business side and the technical side.

DITA Implementation in a Geographically Dispersed, ESL Team
Tony Self – HyperWrite Pty, Ltd.
Australia
Gjertrud Wiggen Kamstrup – Visma Software International AS
Norway

This case study reviews the progress of a DITA implementation project at Visma Software in Norway. Visma is the leading provider of business and enterprise software in the Nordic market. A project to move software documentation from Word and RoboHelp to DITA was started in early 2010. An unusual feature of the project team is the fact that it is geographically dispersed, that no one writing the documentation is a technical writer, and that the majority of these authors have English as a second language. About 20 DITA authors, from Norway, Sweden, Romania and Finland, are now collaboratively developing documents for publication to PDF, Web and Help. The DITA consultant supporting the project is based literally at the other end of the world from Norway, in Australia. Despite the challenges, the project is proceeding steadily. Some innovative approaches have been adopted, including the automatic generation of 13,000 reference topics! In this session, the project structure, software selection, training approach, and project management is described, along with the problems encountered and the hurdles still ahead.

DITA Localization for Managers
Su-Laine Yeo – JustSystems (XMetaL)
Canada

This session gives a practical set of steps and guidelines for delivering your content smoothly and quickly in multiple languages. We will cover how to mark up content, how localization affects reuse, how to work with translators, and issues in generating localized deliverables. You’ll learn about the big picture of how translation works in DITA, what steps you need to include in your process in order to get high-quality results, and exactly how to avoid common pitfalls that tend to make localization tricky. This session is suitable for teams using any toolset; however there will be an emphasis on the DITA Open Toolkit for generating output. If you have an understanding of basic DITA concepts and a need to make your localization process more efficient, this session is for you.

DITA Specialization: Tools for Visual Support
Gunthilde Sohn & Alexej Spas – instinctools GmbH
Germany

This presentation shows how the otherwise complicated activity of DITA specialization can be handled comfortably in a visual way. The benefits of having infrastructure support for DITA specialization in terms of model validation, import, export and integration with version control and documentation environment will also be discussed.

The agenda of this presentation will be as follows:

• Traditional approach to doing DITA Specializations
• Main challenges in doing DITA Specializations
• Traditional vs. Visual Specialization/Benefits of visual over traditional Specializations
• Demo by doing an example Specialization using visual tools

Dynamic DITA Content Generation for the Product Messages from the Source Files
Santhosh Krishnamoorthy & Vishal George – IBM Corporation
India

Problem Statement:
Any product, either mature or relatively new, will have a chunk of messages embedded in them, called the product messages.These messages are perceived as ERRORS, WARNINGS, or INFORMATION messages by the user while working with the product.

Since, the user encounters these messages very often during his experience with the product, appropriate and accurate documentation of these messages is critical. Documenting these messages, requires these messages and their respective details to be in the DITA/DITAMAP formats. In their source form, these messages are in a raw format, such as files with extensions like .gen/.gti/.ab etc. The number of these messages could run into thousands in a typical product development organization.

So, the challenge lies in implementing a solution that creates a bridge between the raw product messages and the DITA files. This bridge should identify the required elements from the product message files that are fed into it and generate the DITA and the DITAMAP files automatically. This will make the whole process a lot simpler, saving essential resources like time and effort.

Proposed Solution:
To solve the above mentioned problem, we have in our organization, implemented a method that automatically collects the files that hold the product messages and generates the respective DITA and DITAMAP files that in turn generate the relevant documentation for these messages.

For this, we developed a parser (a set of scripts) that when fed in with the source files,in our case these are the *.gen files (the parser can be tailored for any other formats easily),containing the product messages, identifies the essential key elements that hold the information needed, converts them into metadata and generates the necessary DITA and DITAMAP files, which are then fed into the regular documentation build to generate the entire documentlibrary for the product.

Thus, this provides a very simple, efficient and an end-to-end solution to the time consuming process of generating the DITA and then the documentation for the messages in the product.

Dynamic Publishing: The ultimate end-game of DITA deployments
Frank Closset & Thomas Barthel – SDL Structured Content Technologies
Belgium

There are a variety of reasons organizations move to DITA: to drive down translation costs, increase reuse, robust support for repurposing content in different output types. While those drivers are compelling and often justify DITA deployments, the real end-game of DITA is only now being envisioned and realized. That end-game is the ability to deliver content dynamically.

This session both defines and explores the power of dynamic publishing. We begin by considering the various complementary understandings of dynamic publishing in the market. The session discusses how these are tied to a different vision of the business benefits to be gained by moving to a structured authoring process and a dynamic publishing methodology. Discussion also includes how and why DITA is an enabler of dynamic publishing, the various ways to achieve dynamic publishing and some technology requirements to consider. Finally, this session considers how to present the vision of dynamic publishing to management and the ROI justification behind these trends. We conclude the session with a short demo of the technology enabling dynamic publishing using DITA.

Those who attend this session will learn:

• Why Dynamic Publishing adoption is increasing speed
• How DITA and Dynamic Publishing are natural complements
• The business benefits of Dynamic Publishing
• The steps to get ready for Dynamic Publishing
• Types of technologies used to achieve the vision
• Designing best practices for establishing and maintaining content for Dynamic Publishing in multiple languages
• Creating Personas that accurately reflect your user base
• Measuring the way in which content is consumed and identifying content not used
• Developing use cases for Dynamic Publishing

You’ll walk away with a set of best practices that you can incorporate into your daily practice.

From proprietary XML to DITA
Thilo Buchholz – SAP AG
Germany

10 years ago, SAP Education implemented a proprietary semantic XML application to industrialize the multi-lingual production, localization, and customization of training material for instructor-led training. Based on this successful implementation, a project has been initiated to move to an infrastructure based on DITA for learning content. The presentation explains the business motivation for moving from our proprietary content architecture to DITA. This change has been found to be exceptionally hard due to the fact that there was already a well perceived XML-based infrastructure supporting sophisticated authoring and customizing features. The presenter shares his experiences during the initialization and starting phase of the implementation project.

Get a grip!—DITA constraints
Jang Graat – JANG Communication
The Netherlands

DITA has grown from just under 100 elements in DITA 1.0 to almost 600 in DITA 1.2 and there is reason to believe that this number will keep growing in future releases. The simple fact that the elements are semantic in nature causes unavoidable growth. This influences the complexity of DITA and the learning curve for novice users. The constraints mechanism introduced in DITA 1.2 can be used to counter the development toward increasing complexity, without making DITA less powerful. On the contrary, constraining the options of your authors will do them and your publications a lot of good. Advantages of constraints over specialization will be included in the presentation.

Getting Started: How to convince your management to move to DITA
Sheila D'Annunzio – STMicroelectronics
France

For most technical authors the benefits of moving to DITA are so obvious that it is difficult to understand why management may be reluctant to support it, but the reality is that many technical documentation groups struggle to get the resources and budget they need to implement DITA.

This presentation, based on a real business case, will show you how to build a business case to convince your top management to move to DITA. In particular it will go through the steps of finding out what’s wrong today, defining the goals and objectives of the project and most importantly for management, explain a way to calculate the Return on Investment.

Handling Conflicts between DITA and Warnings
Marie-Louise Flacke – Zebrafish International
Nolwenn Kerzreho – Thales
France

Implementing warnings in DITA has generated some issues. With DITA 1.1, Notes and Cautions use the same element. Simply adding new elements ends up in a document structure that is no-longer DITA-compliant.

DITA 1.2 includes the EU-Machinery warning guidelines, but is not compatible with previous DITA versions.

Research on safety warnings demonstrates warnings don’t increase safety. Indeed, the effect of a warning message on a person's behavior is unpredictable: although a warning can be noticed, read, and acted upon, it is just as likely to be missed, ignored, or has an effect opposite to the one intended.

Therefore, why bother with so many kinds of warnings, notes, etc.?

Indeed, what is a warning? It is an INSTRUCTION on how to prevent a failure/incident/accident.

Based on multiple examples, we demonstrate that converting warnings into step-by-step instructions offers a DITA-compliant solution.

How Controlled English, Simplified Illustrations and Augmented Reality and DITA form the future of content
Berry Braster – Tedopres International, Inc.
The Netherlands

The use of standards for content are:

• controlled language (Simplified Technical English)
• simplified illustrations
• DITA
• augmented reality

During this presentation content quality advocate Berry Braster will discuss the total content solution: how communication of information can be executed most effectively and efficiently, resulting in considerable cost and time savings, to name but a few benefits.

How to Become an Expert Terminologist in 30 Minutes (Without Spreadsheets)
Carl Yao – CSOFT International Ltd.
China

As an integral step in quality content development, terminology management provides global businesses with a great number of tangible benefits, such as improved quality, better customer experience, standardized brand image, as well as reduced localization and support costs.

Owing to the highly collaborative nature of the process, however, effective terminology management has traditionally been a challenge to many organizations. This is because terminology management involves active and non-linear participation from upwards of 10 different functional teams that are often based in different locations, including product R&D, software engineering, hardware engineering, technical writing, marketing, training, etc. (and that’s for the source documents alone).

TermWiki was developed from the ground up to effectively address the challenge of managing this collaborative process throughout the entire terminology development, management, and distribution lifecycle. As a wiki-based system, it supports real-time collaboration with significant functional improvements for terminology creation, translation, review and approval. It is also a suite of more advanced features, such as Google-like terminology search, cradle-to-grave version control, and seamless change notifications.

Based on our user-oriented Web 2.0 design principles, TermWiki delivers unrivaled usability with an easy-to-use program interface and an intuitive workflo, all directly accessible over the Internet without any custom software installations.

With TermWiki, anyone can become an expert corporate terminologist in as little as 30 minutes!

How to Unlock Legacy Technical Information and Reduce Localisation Costs Across International Markets
Richard Foskett, David Balzan, & Nick Gregory – Entity Group Limited
United Kingdom

The case study is for a data management solution covering the technical and repair information of an automotive manufacturer’s European operations.

The business problem to be solved had the following facets:

• rapid expansion in the number of models
• growth in technical information volume per model
• growth in the number of markets and languages served
• demand for shorter time to deliver the information into the market
• user surveys that indicated usability issues with the data
• deadlines of the Euro 5 regulations

The authoring process was fixed and not within scope, therefore the data (both legacy data and the pipeline) had to be managed and enriched. The problem was simple—to describe data handling and data enrichment.

Various tools and techniques were applied. Amongst these was DITA, which had to be inserted into the existing production flow. The DITA data was then used to reduce the effort and cost involved in localisation. The data was made available as topic-based content that allowed publishing in more useful and accessible forms.

The solution has been running for more than a year and has exceeded expectations.

Internal and External Communities: A practical look at modern content delivery
Mark Poston – Mekon Ltd.
United Kingdom

To deliver a better customer experience and differentiate their product or service, today’s organisations are paying more attention to their content consumers. Working out audience profiles and delivering content optimised for those end user information needs, not to mention internal staff that has yet another set of requirements, means evolving how we deliver to these communities. They want to communicate with each other, and the corporate content can be the context for that collaboration—if we facilitate the discussion properly.

This presentation addresses:

• Practical issues on delivering content for varied communities
• How they can be addressed using current web technologies
• Potential integration points into existing systems
• The nature and importance of Web Microformats
• Current initiatives of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee aimed at web and help content

It Takes a Village: Managing publications with many contributors
Mark Forry & Pia Chamberlain – NetApp, Inc.
USA

After transitioning to a DITA/CMS publication system, NetApp Information Engineering has been able to simplify production and improve usability of large product Release Notes by adopting a distributed authoring model. In the process, Release Notes have evolved from a deliverable owned by a single writer to one owned by a flexible team of 20 or more. This model takes advantage of the modularity of DITA and the workflow and auditing capabilities of the CMS to provide gains in efficiency, consistency, and reuse.

In this presentation, Mark and Pia describe how NetApp moved from a “one deliverable, one author” model to a model based on team-produced deliverables and describe the methodology and challenges of managing a team-produced deliverable in a DITA/CMS environment.

Making DITA Work Across the Enterprise
Doug Gorman – Simply XML
USA

Speakers will discuss the opportunities and constraints to moving DITA beyond Tech Pubs. It will introduce and highlight a very easy-to-understand subset of the DITA standard that can be easily learned and used by non-technical staff who author in Microsoft Word. It will highlight and demonstrate how this simplified DITA structure can also be used and enhanced by technical staff that uses the traditional XML editors. There will be an audience discussion of issues surrounding broader adoption of DITA but also successes and failures and ROI's achieved by large organizations.

Modular Publishing: Reusing styles across publications
Hal Trent & Anne Bovard – Comtech Services, Inc.
USA

In this talk, Hal and Anne design and define a publishing architecture that accommodates multiple PDF deliverables from a single publishing location. Hal and Anne demonstrate how to properly configure the DITA-OT for advanced reuse and highlight the key reusable components in an advanced publishing architecture. In addition to technically detailing how the advanced publishing environment should be set up, they offer insights on publishing reuse decisions and use cases. Attendees will receive instructions and the examples from the talk.

Portable Implementation of DITA Reusable Components
George Bina – Syncro Soft/oXygen XML Editor
Romania

Creating reusable components is a constant request from people working with DITA. This presentation describes a mechanism that allows creating reusable components from existing topic content automatically, reusable components that will work with any DITA-aware tool without the need for any configuration.

The technique is based on detecting the DTD or XML Schema used in the topic that contains the content and then creating an on-the-fly DITA specialization on top of that, by defining container elements and referring to the detected DTD or schema for the content of the container elements.

There are two major advantages with this approach. First, the method works with any DITA specialization; there is no need for any manual intervention in order to create reusable components no matter what DTD or schema the containing topic refers to. Second, the result is portabl; it does not depend on the tool used to create the reusable components, and thus any tool can process the result DITA files.

psssst!—The Secret of Great DITA is Really about STM and LTM
George Hayden – Chat Hat
USA

We claim that we know something if we can recall it from memory. But which memory? Our short term memory (STM) or our long term memory (LTM)?

Semantic encoding of concepts for recall from long term memory is very different than temporarily juggling the recall of a reference fact in short term memory.

Come to this highly entertaining and interactive session to reinvigorate and expand your understanding of fundamental approaches to reuse.

You will leave with a new found appreciation for the difference between the seas of evergreen fickle facts and the more timeless truth of generic concepts. Learn how to solve the puzzle of needing book-like sequence and packaging, while evolving toward topics that are context and sequence agnostic yet sequence and context aware.

You will be introduced to the Authoring design tools of Task-onomy, I6, and ColorTag.

By the end of the session, you will see opportunities for re-use as never before.

Principles of semantic encoding are clearly presented in a surprisingly simple analogy between STM/LTM in humans and RAM/ROM in computers.

Taking DITA to Infinity and Beyond
Frank Shipley – Componize Software
France

To many, managing and publishing your DITA content may seem easy – no need to be a space ranger with a super computer to do that ... or do you?

Well you definitely need to be a space ranger to get the DITA Open Toolkit up and running on your laptop and although your laptop may happily run your builds, you may start to wonder what else you could be doing instead of watching all of those messages scroll through the console window. Wouldn't it be nice to see your output processed at lightening speed or even better to have a preview of your content in real-time? What about all of those other time-consuming tasks such as tracking down broken links and searching for that topic you know is there but can't remember where? Isn't there a solution out there that will validate your links in real-time and provide you with that intergalactic search engine you've always dreamed about?

In reality, there are many tasks that need to be performed quickly and efficiently in order to manage your DITA content effectively. As the volume and complexity of your source files increases, so does the demand on the system that is managing them. With the arrival of DITA 1.2 and many new and exciting features, the complexity and demand is even greater ... so it looks like we'll need that super computer afterall ... or do we?

During the presentation, we will see how many of the valuable features in DITA are difficult to implement using traditional approaches and architectures. With the arrival of DITA 1.2, the challenges are even greater. The speaker will present an alternative approach based on an elastic architecture that will scale "to infinity and beyond."

Translation-Enabled Content Management
Eric Kuhnen – Astoria Software
USA

Structured Content drives two broad advantages, single-source content management and efficient translation expenditure. Standards bodies and vendor offerings have coalesced around these two advantages, and market forces are now seeing some consolidation and partnership arrangements that bridge these two camps. However, there exists an imbalance between vendors of content management and vendors of globalization management that limit the extent to which customers derive maximum value from such combined capabilities. Translation-Enabled Content Management resolves this imbalance by defining additional capabilities in the content management arena that enable the most efficient use of translation budgets. As an industry initiative, Translation-Enabled Content Management is a vendor-independent approach. It is also a first step in an evolving business environment that is grappling with unresolved situations facing customers. Refinement of the initiative is inevitable.

A Unified Process for Authoring Technical and Learning Content with DITA-based on Activity Theory
Sissi Closs – Comet Computer GmbH
Thomas Zschocke – United Nations University
Germany

Within the context of the DITA 1.2 Learning and Training specialization this paper proposes an integrated approach for creating technical as well as learning content expressed in DITA using activity theory as a framework. The set of philosophical concepts presented by activity theory originated in the fields of economics and politics. The theory examines the components of a human activity system. It has been applied in a wide range of domains such as computer interaction, information system design, and psychology. Activity theory has also great applicability to the design and implementation of learning activities. The theory creates for the instructional designer a framework to assess tasks within the context in which they occur. Using relevant examples, this presentation looks at how a unified process can help to generate more efficiently technical and learning content by focusing on whole-task models for task-oriented instruction. With DITA as source XML format, the content can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways.

Using DITA in Massive Open Source Projects
Paul Ross & Nick Hill – Nokia
United Kingdom

Nokia is a founder member of the Symbian Foundation that maintains the Open source Symbian OS and S60 user interface for mobile devices. This is the most widely used mobile OS for smartphones and one of the largest open source projects ever. Nokia developed the DITA specialization for the C++ programming language as well as the tool chain used to create documentation that runs into millions of words. Nokia’s DITA specialization and tool chain have been contributed back as opensource.

This presentation explains how this was done and how anyone can use this DITA specialization, or the tool chain, that produces this extensive documentation.

Using the Task Analysis for Effective Documentation
Kristina Brinck – ITT Fluid & Motions Control
Sweden

The Global Enterprise Content Management (GECM) system works to mainstream and reuse technical information across Value Centres and companies within ITT. This system uses a common technical platform, including DITA, but also uses a common documentation process with roles and responsibilities, job descriptions, authoring guidelines and other steering documents.

The task analysis is one important part of the GECM documentation process, ensuring that all approved content is relevant, complete, consistent, clear, and possible to reuse, and that the time line set for each project is realistic.

In this session Kristina describes the following:

• How the task analysis is performed for entirely new outputs and for outputs with high reuse
• How the task analysis enables a common understanding of goals of the documentation
• How the task analysis results in the Annotated Topic List
• How the Annotated Topic List works as a working plan for the writers