I can't believe my last post was back in 2011! The advent of social media has definitely affected my available blog time. If you need to catch up on my recent activity, check out my FaceBook or Twitter.
They say the best time to leave a job is on your own terms and timing. That is also true in this case. I was contacted by a member of one of my XML standards committees about an opportunity to consult in my area of expertise. I will be providing information design and XML content management consulting with Comtech Services, Inc. I will also continue to be active in the OASIS DITA and OASIS DocBook standards, but sadly, not ONVIF.
My first ONVIF meeting was in Zug, Switzerland at Siemens, and it turns out my last meeting was at Pelco in Fort Collins, Colorado. I touched a lot of areas in ONVIF, including:
- Application Programmers Guide
- Storage, Profile G
- Device Test Tool, Maintenance
- Profile Q specification
- Client Test Tool
- Enhancement WG
- ONVIF Conformance Process
- ONVIF Profile Policy
- ONVIF Interface Guide
- WSDL documentation format
- ONVIF booth at IFSEC 2013, ISC West 2014
- Tourism WG (started in Hangzhou, China!)
- Karaoke WG (Nuremberg, Singapore)
I truly consider my time with ONVIF to be one of the major accomplishments of my career.
I also had a lot of successes at Pelco. I managed the Pelco Developer Network (PDN) site, including information architecture, administration and content creation. I optimized the process for creating the Pelco SDK documentation using oXygen XML editor, schematron and DITA. I implemented the WSDL documentation format for the Pelco APIs.
Considering that I was entirely new to the video surveillance industry, I think I made a decent impact over almost 5 years! I was able to bring best practices in XML documentation to Pelco and to the ONVIF standard, and met many unforgettable people and places along the way.
