Welcome, Jeni!

Jeni Tennison has entered the blogosphere! Welcome, Jeni! Jeni and Michael Kay are my primary sources of XSLT wisdom, so I look forward to reading her posts!

Interoperability getting some attention!

We're getting some exposure on the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework now! Check out this entry on the Gilbane blog:
http://gilbane.com/blog/2007/04/dita_docbook_and_odf_interoper.html

Thanks to Jim for sending me the link...

SKYWARN at the OASIS Symposium

SWEET! Being a trained SKYWARN spotter and HAM operator, I was really impressed by the presentation from Michelle Raymond on the Emergency Management TC. During the presentation, she sent an alert to an OASIS demo web service that alerted many blackberries in the audience. Wish I had a subscription to that service :-)

The Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) was described in detail, including the Common Alerting Progocal (CAP). NWS uses the CAP already today!

This may be one of the few times I will ever get to use the tags "Weather" and "OASIS" on the same blog post! :-)

Some interesting sites related to this include: http://www.esi911.com/esi/products/webeoc.shtml

Interoperability at OASIS Symposium 2007

I'm presenting this week at the OASIS Symposium in San Diego.

A very interesting theme has emerged in the morning sessions, which is that of interoperability. I find this very encouraging and other standards bodies should stand up and take notice!

Bob Sutor, VP of Open Source and Standards at IBM gave a very interesting keynote that included this theme. He gave a great example of ODF and how they are addressing accessibility and interoperability as part of the standard.

Another interesting tidbit from his preso was on how to measure the "openness" of a standard:

• Development - how was it developed, who got to play, who contributed, how much did they contribute?
• Maintenance – who is maintaining? How are RFEs handled? Errors? What happens after v1?
• Implementation – are there any roadblocks preventing open source? Can it be implemented?
• Acquisition – can you get a hold of the standard? Can you download for free? Many standards orgs are not that way! Can you afford it around the world?

Following Bob's keynote, another terrific presentation was given by Bob Stayton. Bob Stayton was talking about interoperability between DocBook and DITA. Bob primarily focused on a form of processing interoperability, where source DITA content is transformed to DocBook to take advantage of the DocBook publishing toolchain.

After Bob, I presented "A Doc Standards Interoperability Framework for DocBook, DITA, ODF and more!". I'll provide a link here when the slides are available online.

Overall, the talk was well received and I look forward to getting the proposed Document Standards Interoperability TC started at OASIS! I also had the pleasure of meeting Alex Wang, from the UOML TC, who has been very active on the docstandards-interop-discuss list at OASIS recently. I look forward to exchanging ideas about interoperability!

This is the first OASIS Symposium I've attended. Hats off to Patrick Gannon, Mary McRae, Jane Harnad and the other OASIS folks who've put this together. I'm quite pleased with the level of technical detail and expertise here at the Symposium.

I'm attending some presos on BPEL, BPM and SCA (Business Process Modeling and SOA Component Architectures) right now. Will blog additional detail later!

DocBook SC for Publishers wiki page is up!

For those interested in following our efforts on the SC, I've set up a page on the DocBook wiki:
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/Publishers

Velocity DocBook Framework

Elliotte Rusty Harold pointed me to the Apache Velocity DocBook Framework at: http://velocity.apache.org/docbook/.

This looks pretty interesting and would be an easy way for folks to set up a multi-platform processing framework for DocBook. It uses the community stylesheet releases from sourceforge, but makes it easier to set up the rest of the toolchain.

Definitely worth giving it a test drive!

Welcome, James!

James Clark, the father of groff, sgmls, SP, DSSL, Jade, expat, XP, XT, TREX, XSLT, nXML mode, Relax, Jing, Trang, and best of all RelaxNG has entered the blogosphere! His blog is http://blog.jclark.com

James has started with an interesting proposal called TEDI (Type Expressions for Data Interchange, pronounced "Teddy").

James, please keep working on RelaxNG, too! For its elegance and ease of use, I love it! Remember: If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

Free Fallin'

To celebrate my friend, Lee Martin's, 30th birthday we went indoor skydiving on Saturday. We had both always wanted to go skydiving, but never had the opportunity. Thankfully, Lee's wife found SkyVenture (http://www.skyventurecolorado.com/)!

The indoor skydive was a very non-stress and fun environment. Our "freefall" lasted only 2 minutes per dive, but it was so much fun! An instructor was close by to give direction and correct any balance issues. He also did some tandem stunts to keep it lively.

With the indoor skydiving, you don't have to worry about chute failure or bugs in your teeth, either! We even got a DVD and flight certificate to commemorate the event. I highly recommend it.