Session at tcworld 2016. Organized by Kristen James Eberlein (Eberlein Consulting LLC); other participants were Joe Gollner (Gnostyx), George Bina (SyncroSoft), Jean-François Ameye (IXIASOFT), and Eliot Kimber (Contrext).

1. DITA
interoperability
Using standards to connect the dots
Session at tcworld 2016
8 November 2016
Stuttgart, Germany

2. Participants
• Jean-François Ameye, IXIASOFT
• George Christian Bina, Syncro Soft
• Kristen James Eberlein, Chair of
DITA TC & Eberlein Consulting
• Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research
• Eliot Kimber, Contrext

3. Agenda
1. What is interoperability and why should I care?
2. Open standards: What they are, OASIS and DITA, benefits
3. Unique DITA contribution: Specialization
4. The specialization used in the demo
5. Demos!
6. Takeways from the demos
7. Questions? Discussion

4. What is interoperability?
And why should I care?
• Interoperability is enabled by open standards.
• With DITA, interoperability means:
• DITA content can be processed by multiple,
interoperable applications.
• DITA content can be shared and exchanged within
a wide technical environment.
• DITA content is portable and can be moved
through multiple business environments.
• DITA also is extensible; DITA content can be
specialized without affecting interchange.

5. What is an open standard?
• Developed under the governance of an standards organization,
whose rules direct how the work is conducted.
• Standards guaranteed to be free and available in perpetuity.
• DITA is developed and maintained by a techical committee at
OASIS.

6. More about OASIS …
• A not-for-profit consortium that develops open standards
• More than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations
and individual members in more than 65 countries.
• Distinguished by its transparent governance and operating procedures:
• Membership is open to everyone.
• Members set the OASIS technical agenda.
• Specification are ratified by open ballot.
• Officers are chosen by democratic election.
• Consortium leadership is based on individual merit and is not tied to
financial contribution, corporate standing, or special appointment.

7. DITA at OASIS
• DITA is developed and maintained by the DITA Technical Committee (TC).
• Work of the TC– DTDs, minutes, reports, e-mail, specification drafts –
is visible to everyone.
• Checks and balances built into the process:
• Members and the general public can comment before a standard is approved.
• The TC must acknowledge and track these comments.

8. High-level overview:
Benefits of open standards
• Development of wide array of tools that support the
standard
• Development of robust community of users and
developers who are familiar with the standard
• Enables companies to be increasingly agile and
participate in the quick-paced, modern, business
economy

9. Benefits of an open standard: Tools
• A standard architecture and element/attribute set encourages
the proliferation of tools that support the standard:
• Authoring tools
• CCMs
• Rendering engines
• Localization workbenches
• Publishing formats
• Delivery portals
• Competition and collaboration drives cost down and prevents
vendor lock-in

10. Benefits of an open standard: Community
A growing community of users and developers who are familiar with the
standard:
• Creates a bigger hiring pool of resources
• Enables employees to become productive more quickly
(reduces time to train people on proprietary tools)
• Generates user-built forums for problem solving
and innovation
• Spawns conferences and user groups
• Supports collaboration

11. Benefits of an open standard:
Business agility
• Content can be more easily shared with business partners and suppliers
• Prepares business for a future that includes acquisitions, mergers,
partnerships, development of new product suites
• Supports an enterprise environment that contains divisions that use
multiple tools
• Positions businesses to adopt new technologies as they emerge

12. And what does DITA add?
• Extensibility!
• Specialization enables companies to develop markup that:
• Meets their specific business needs
• Remains interchangeable
• And much more, including
• Profound cost lowering compared to other XML solutions
• Powerful reuse mechanisms that:
• Enable rapid rebranding
• Streamline the content process
• Enforce editorial consistency

13. What is specialization?
• A unique feature of the DITA architecture
• Ability to define a new object as a more specific type of an existing object
• Specializations can be generalized back to the ancestor element
• Examples:
• Automobile
• Sports car
• Truck
• Limousine
• Sedan
• Quotation
• Pull-quote
• Inline quote
• Block quote

14. Benefits of specialization
• Increased semantic meaning drives authoring precision,
findability, etc
• Reduces new design and development work; you can build
on existing design and development work
• Easy to share with others (business partners, other
divisions of a company, etc.)
• Lowers cost
• Makes meeting future business requirements less
expensive

15. Specialization in the demo
• The sample set for this demo contains a very simple specialization.
• A FAQ topic that contains elements for “question” and “answer”

16. Summary
• Two factors – DITA as a standard & DITA specialization – act to enable interchange between
companies as never before.
• A rich, competitive tool environment
• Community of DITA authors and developers
• Acceleration of business agility
• DITA enables content to flow rapidly in the interconnected, fast-paced modern economy.

17. Introducing the
demonstration
scenarios
Joe Gollner
Gnostyx Research

18. What we will see
• The demonstration scenarios
will show
• A supply chain of companies
all working with DITA Content
and sharing that content
• Some companies
using out-of-the box DITA
• Other companies providing & using
specialized DITA
• DITA generalization being used to share
specialized DITA with service providers
who work with out-of-the-box DITA
like many localization service providers
(without losing the value of the
specialization)
DITA

19. Tools we will see
The scenarios use the following DITA tools:
• oXygen Editor
• IXIASOFT DITA CMS
• DITA Open Toolkit
• DITA4Publishers
• Titania Delivery
We will see that DITA content
(out-of-the-box & specialized)
• Can move easily between tools
• Can be processed in many ways
• Can be leveraged using
• New community-developed capabilities
• DITA4Publishers
• Innovative new product capabilities
fostered by a competitive market for DITA tools

20. Core scenarios
OWL
Soft
Software Supplier
provides OEM
components
Thunderbird
Software
Software Integrator
aggregates components
& content from
suppliers like OwlSoft &
HawkVision
NetCo
Customer of Thunderbird
who delivers portable
product documentation
with their own guidance
ACME
Solutions
Business services
partner of NetCo that
leverages a dynamic
knowledge base
1. OwlSoft
Specialist software provider
using out-of-the-box DITA
2. Thunderbird Software
combining components &
content from suppliers
a. Out-of-the-box DITA
b. Specialized DITA
c. Generalized DITA
3. NetCo
Customer that delivers an
ePub with product and
procedure documentation
4. Acme
Business services partner of
NetCo that deploys a dynamic
online knowledge base

21. DITA authoring
scenario
Using oXygen XML Editor and
oXygen XML Web Author
George Bina
Syncro Soft

22. Scenario #1: Authoring DITA content
OwlSoft develops a product named StormCluster, which is included in
solutions for several business partners.
OwlSoft develops their documentation in DITA for several reasons:
• Partners require XML to enable multi-channel publication
• Easy to rebrand the content for different partners
• Relatively low-cost of entry due to the robust tool environment
OwlSoft uses out-of-the-box DITA – no specializations – and GitHub for
version control.
OwlSoft uses both the desktop and Web-based version of oXygen XML Editor.
The oXygen XML Web Author provides developers with easy access to review
and contribute content.

23. Overview
• Work with DITA in a desktop editor (oXygen XML Editor)
• Publish to different formats – PDF, WebHelp
• Enable contributions and review using an online editor (oXygen XML Web
Author)

24. OWLSoft User Guide - DITA map

25. Quick view of all topics from the user guide

26. The “Logging on to MobileView” topic

27. Mark “log in” as user interface control

28. Different degrees of showing structure

29. Quick publishing to many formats

30. WebHelp – using aqamarine theme

31. WebHelp - topic page

32. PDF – table of contents

33. PDF – topic view

34. WebHelp with EDIT action – topic view

35. Click to open in oXygen XML Web Author

36. Save to commit changes to repository

37. Request to accept the proposed change

38. Automatic re-publishing of updated
content

39. Updated WebHelp content

40. Take-aways
• DITA is a good fit for small companies
• You can have immediate deliverables
• Combining different services, you can get a lot of functionality with a
reasonable budget

41. DITA storage
scenario
Using IXIASOFT DITA CMS
Jean-François Ameye
IXIASOFT

42. Scenario #2: Storing content
Thunderbird is one of the companies that includes StormCluster in their solutions.
As their company became more successful and sold more products, they
purchased a CMS (the IXIASOFT DITA CMS). They needed the CMS because they:
• Have a large number of writers
• Localize content
• Have multiple product lines with content reused among them
Thunderbird integrates a product from another company: HawkVision. Some of
HawkVision’s DITA content uses a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ)
specialization, so Thunderbird added that specialization to their repository.
Thunderbird needs to translate the HawkVision content VERY QUICKLY. In order to
expedite matters – avoid the localization vendor needing to do any configuration
work – Thunderbird generalizes the content. When the translated content is
imported into the CMS, it is re-specialized.

43. What you’ll see
1. Integrating the FAQ specialization
2. Importing the FAQ content
3. Creating a new FAQ topic
4. Exporting the content as generalized (OOB) DITA to optimize localization

44. Scenario 2, step 1:
OwlSoft content integrated in Thunderbird CCMS
Company name
and logo changed
to “Thunderbird”
StormCluster
User Guide
provided by
OwlSoft

45. Scenario 2, step 2:
HawkVision specialized FAQ content
FAQ specialization is
not recognized
because the plugin
hasn’t been integrated
Topic uses the FAQ
specialization

46. Scenario 2, step 3:
FAQ specialization integrated in CCMS
FAQ specialization
plugin integrated in
DITA CMS
configuration

47. Scenario 2, step 4:
HawkVision content in CCMS
FAQ topics can now
be imported in the
CCMS and added
to the StormCluster
User Guide

48. Scenario 2, step 5:
FAQ content exported in generalized form
Exported topic uses
the out-of-the-box
OASIS concept type
Specialized elements
have been generalized but
retain their specialized
@class attribute
Exported map
can be opened
in a tool that
does not have
the FAQ
specialization

49. DITA publishing
scenario
Using DITA Open Toolkit and DITA for
Publishers
Eliot Kimber
Contrext

50. Scenario #3: Publishing to EPUB
NetCo Limited is a customer of Thunderbird; it wants to add their
content to Thunderbird + HawkVision and publish their content to EPUB
for use by field technicians who will be viewing content on a hand-held
device.
They decide to use DITA for Publishers to generate EPUB.
NetCo receives the source content from Thunderbird, who exported it
from their CMS as a ZIP file. They also shared the DTD files for the
specialized marketing FAQ.

51. What you’ll see
1. Install DTDs
2. Create a master publication that aggregates content from the two
companies
3. Generate EPUB

52. Install DTDs
• No screen capture provided

53. Create a master publication

54. Generate EPUB (1 of 2)

55. Generate EPUB (2 of 2)

56. DITA dynamic
delivery
scenario
Using Titania Delivery
Kristen James Eberlein
Eberlein Consulting

57. Scenario #4: Exploring dynamic delivery
Acme Solutions is a services partner of NetCo. Company.
As a services provider, they need to provide a dynamic knowledge base for all
their customers and business.
Acme Solutions decide to investigate using Titania Delivery in order to
publish content from many companies in a Web portal that can be updated
directly as companies approve content in their CMS.

58. What you’ll see …
1. Integrating DTDs
2. Uploading content
3. Making content visible in the portal
4. Viewing content in the portal

59. Create a DTD project

60. Upload the DTDs

61. Associate the DTDs with the content project

62. Upload the content and away you go!

63. Double-check … yes, this is specialized content.

64. Rendered in customer-facing portal
Note that we did
NOT install any
style sheets; the
application is
specialization-
aware and
rendered the new
elements based
on their ancestry.

65. So what have we seen?
• Ease of installing and publishing specialized content
• Simply share the DTDs
• Fallback rendering
• No need to create new style for the specialized elements
• The specialized elements inherit the styles from the ancestor elements.

66. DITA
interoperability
summation
Joe Gollner
Gnostyx Research

67. DITA and interoperability
• Openness & extensibility
• Essential for interoperability
• Permit business partners to
• Optimize individually
• Optimize as a partner network
at the same time
• Creates an innovation marketplace
• Community innovations
• Vendor innovations
• Essential to making Intelligent Information a reality

68. Questions and answers, discussion

69. We want feedback …
Your opinion is important
to us!
Please tell us what you
thought of the sessions.
Send feedback by
scanning the QR code or
going to the following URL:
http://dita03.honestly.de

70. DITA Forum
All DITA Forum presentations are in Room 6.1 OG.
8:45–9:30 DITA Customization: Create Your Own Flavor
9:45–10:30 From Custom XML to DITA
11:15–13:00 DITA Interoperability
14:45–15:30 DITA: The Road to Delivering Digital Content at
Siemens Rail
16:15–17:00 Developing Training Websites in Multiple Languages
with (Mostly) Open-Source Tools
17:15–18:00 DITA: A Big Decision: Custom XML versus XML
Standards—or No XML at All?

71. Applications used in the demos
• oXygen XML Editor and oXygen XML WebHelp
• IXIASOFT DITA CMS
• DITA Open Toolkit
• DITA for Publishers
• Titania Delivery

72. Contact information for presenters
• Jean-François Ameye
jean-francois.ameye@ixiasoft.com
• Kristen James Eberlein
kris@eberleinconsulting.com
• George Christian Bina
george@oxygenxml.com
• Joe Gollner
jag@gnostyx.com
• Eliot Kimber
ekimber@contrext.com

73. Back-up slides

74. Example of a specialization: DITA source
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE faq PUBLIC "-//EXAMPLE//DTD DITA FAQ//EN" "faq.dtd">
<faq id=" kom1478229506342" xml:lang="en-us">
<question>How do I change the size of the node icons?</question>
<answer>
<p>To decrease the node size, press
<uicontrol>Ctrl+[</uicontrol>.</p>
<p>To increase the node size, press
<uicontrol>Ctrl+]</uicontrol>.</p>
</answer>
</faq>

75. Example specialization: Generalized DITA
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE concept PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Concept//EN"
“concept.dtd">
<concept id="kom1478229506342" xml:lang="en-us"
class="- topic/topic concept/concept faq/faq “ >
<title class="- topic/title faq/question ">How do I change the
size of the node icons?</title>
<conbody class="- topic/body concept/conbody faq/answer ">
<p>To decrease the node size, press
<uicontrol>Ctrl+[</uicontrol>.</p>
<p>To increase the node size, press
<uicontrol>Ctrl+]</uicontrol>.</p>
</conbody>
</concept>