DocBook v5.1 is now an official OASIS Standard!

OASIS is pleased to announce that DocBook Version 5.1. has been approved by the membership as an OASIS Standard [1].

The call to vote was made on 09 November 2016 [2] and the ballot closed on 22 November 2016. A minimum of 42 affirmative votes was needed in order to win approval. The finally vote tally was 63 affirmative votes with 4 abstentions. 

Our congratulations to the members of the TC and to the community of implementers, developers and users who have brought the work successfully to this milestone

DocBook is a general purpose [XML] schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications).

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

The Technical Committee provides the DocBook 5.1 schema in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema and an XML DTD, but the RELAX NG Schema is the normative schema.

URIs:

The prose specifications and related files are available here:

DocBook Version 5.1

HTML (Authoritative): 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.html 

PDF: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.pdf

Editable source:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.xml

Schemas: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/schemas/

DocBook V4.x conversion tools: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/tools/

Distribution ZIP files

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.zip

Voting opens for DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS Standard

The ballot to approve DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS standard is now open, starting at 09 November 2016 at 00:00 UTC. The ballot closes at 22 November 2016 at 11:59 UTC. 

This is a call to the primary or alternate representatives of OASIS Organizational Members to vote. 

If your company is a member of OASIS, please encourage your representative to vote in favor of this standard at: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=3010 

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

To view the specification, please see:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/cos01/docbook-v5.1-cos01.html

DocBook Version 5.1 now in Public Review

The OASIS DocBook TC [1] members have recently approved a Committee Specification Draft (CSD) and submitted it for 30-day public review:

DocBook Version 5.1

Committee Specification Draft 01 / Public Review Draft 01

11 Feb 2015

Overview:

DocBook is a general purpose [XML] schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications). 

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests. 

The Technical Committee provides the DocBook 5.1 schema in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema and an XML DTD, but the RELAX NG Schema is the normative schema. 

TC Description: 

The DocBook Technical Committee maintains the DocBook family of schemas. 

Public Review Period:

The public review starts 23 March 2015 at 00:00 UTC and ends 21 April 2015 at 23:59 UTC. 

This is an open invitation to comment. OASIS solicits feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of its technical work.

Reviewers may provide comments directly from the comment-tag version of document. The file

docbook-v5.1-csprd01-COMMENT-TAGS.html

contains the HTML version of the draft with a “[comment?]” link next to each section heading. Clicking on this link will launch your email application and begin a message to docbook-comment@lists.oasis-open.org with the specific section number and title in the subject line. Simply enter your comment and click send.

Note that you must be subscribed to the comment mailing list before sending feedback. Instructions on how to subscribe can be found at https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=docbook.

URIs:

The prose specification document and related files are available here:

HTML (Authoritative):

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/docbook-v5.1-csprd01.html

HTML with inline tags for direct commenting:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/docbook-v5.1-csprd01-COMMENT-TAGS.html

Editable source: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/docbook-v5.1-csprd01.xml

PDF: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/docbook-v5.1-csprd01.pdf

RELAX NG Schemas: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/schemas/rng/

Schematron Schemas:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/schemas/sch/

XML Catalog:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/schemas/catalog.xml

NVDL Schema:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/schemas/docbook.nvdl

DocBook V4.x conversion tools:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/tools/

ZIP distribution file (complete):

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose document and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/csprd01/docbook-v5.1-csprd01.zip

Additional information about the specification and the OASIS DocBook TC can be found at the TC's public home page:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/docbook/

Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person through the use of the OASIS TC Comment Facility which can be used by following the instructions on the TC's "Send A Comment" page, or directly at:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=docbook

Comments submitted by TC non-members for this work and for other work of this TC are publicly archived and can be viewed at:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-comment/

All comments submitted to OASIS are subject to the OASIS Feedback License, which ensures that the feedback you provide carries the same obligations at least as the obligations of the TC members. In connection with this public review of "DocBook V5.1", we call your attention to the OASIS IPR Policy [2] applicable especially [3] to the work of this technical committee. All members of the TC should be familiar with this document, which may create obligations regarding the disclosure and availability of a member's patent, copyright, trademark and license rights that read on an approved OASIS specification. 

OASIS invites any persons who know of any such claims to disclose these if they may be essential to the implementation of the above specification, so that notice of them may be posted to the notice page for this TC's work.

========== Additional references:

[1] OASIS DocBook TC

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/docbook/

[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php

[3] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees//ipr.php

https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/ipr#s10.2.3

RF on Limited Terms 

If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

This has been my favorite catch phrase, now it's my bumper sticker. The beauty, is that it can be yours too!

http://www.cafepress.com/RelaxNG. Everything is sold at cost, so I'm not in this to make a profit, just to spread the word!

Metadata and Interoperability

Jim Earley has a very thoughtful post on metadata interoperability: http://jims-thoughtspot.blogspot.com/2008/04/metadata-interoperability.html

As part of DocBook v5, we added the ability to include content from other namespaces in the <info> block to support adding Dublin Core directly in your content. The <info> element's purpose is to house metadata that is not intended for display, so it's a really good fit.

Jim's argument, is that the various standards out there (DocBook, DITA, ODF at a minimum) should move to Dublin Core for metadata, and stop re-inventing the wheel. Dublin Core is an internationally accepted standard for metadata, so why not use it directly?!

I whole-heartedly agree. This approach would add more compatibility between standards, and maybe even facilitate better search! Along with that, Dublin Core is extensible, so it shouldn't be too difficult to add additional metadata fields if you need to.

more on DocBook vs. DITA

Teresa Mulvihill has written an article on DocBook vs. DITA at: http://www.dclab.com/dita_docbook.asp.

It's a well thought-out article, but I'd like to make a few clarifications:

As you may know, Jim Earley and I have presented on this topic and our Doc Standards Interoperability Framework at several conferences, and still hope to form an OASIS TC on document standards interoperability.

In the article, Teresa states:

"DocBook is hierarchical by nature, and must be developed to allow for single-sourced content. DocBook has a fixed element and attribute set."

I've successfully used and recommended single-sourcing approaches with DocBook, without additional development. It's quite easy to set up a book or article and use XIncludes or even file entity references to pull in content from a common pool of content structures (usually section or chapter).

It's also fairly easy to extend the elements and attributes in DocBook. This has been made even easier with DocBook v5.0 and RelaxNG. In fact, the DocBook Subcommittee for Publishers that I chair, has helped organize the source patterns for DocBook v5 with a modular approach, enabling easier customizations to be created. Our subcommittee has created a customization geared specifically to publishers, without all of the technical blocks and inlines in full DocBook. This significantly reduces the tag set for folks that do not produce software or technical documentation to use the DocBook standard for general publishing!

DocBook can generate more than PDF, HTML and HTMLHelp. The docbook-xsl-1.73.2 stylesheet distribution supports: html, htmlhelp, javahelp, manpages, xhtml, Word roundtrip, slides and websites!

I would also argue that DocBook can be used on very high volume documentation projects, as well as small and medium projects. Just ask Sun, HP, various Linux distros, and more listed here: http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/WhoUsesDocBook

You might also find Norm's blog on DocBook vs. DITA interesting: http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/21/dita

We are also working on some exciting developments for the Interoperability Framework, so stay tuned!

DocBook v5.0 now an official Committee Draft!

I'm pleased to announce that DocBook v5.0 is now an official Committee Draft! The schema can be downloaded here: http://docbook.org/xml/5.0/.

This is the result of several years work. Special thanks to all of the Committee members involved:

    * Steve Cogorno, Sun Microsystems
    * Gary Cornelius, Individual
    * Adam Di Carlo, Debian
    * Paul Grosso, Arbortext
    * Dick Hamilton, Individual
    * Nancy Harrison, IBM
    * Scott Hudson, Individual
    * Mark Johnson, Debian
    * Gershon Joseph, Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd.
    * Jirka Kosek, Individual
    * Larry Rowland, Hewlett-Packard
    * Michael Smith, Individual
    * Robert Stayton, Individual (Secretary)
    * Norman Walsh, Sun Microsystems (Chair, Editor)

Next step: OASIS standard!

DITA Learning Content accepted for DITA 1.2

More big news in the standards world today! The DITA 1.2 feature proposal #12058, "Design and language specification for DITA learning and training content," submitted by the DITA Learning and Training Content sub-committee was approved at today's DITA TC meeting.

Congratulations to John Hunt and all the members of the DITA Learning Content SC! The specification and sample plugins are all publicly available. Next steps for us is to work on our Best Practices for Implementation and create some sample processing for the DITA OT. This effort will continue into the first quarter of 2008.

DocBook v5.0 now an official Committee Draft!

I was on the road last week and didn't have a chance to post the GREAT news!

At the DocBook TC meeting on November 7, 2007, DocBook V5.0 was approved as a Committee Draft! This draft was a result of several years of hard design work, especially by Norm Walsh, who created 9 Beta Releases and 7 Candidate Releases since October of 2005.

The most exciting feature, IMO, that this standard is based on RelaxNG rather than DTD. DTD and XSD are still supported/provided, but the canonical format is now RelaxNG (RNC). Vendors, start your engines and add support for RelaxNG validation! Actually, several vendors are already "ahead of the game" with RelaxNG support: oXygen XML Editor, XML Mind XXE, Editix, Emacs nXML, Cladonia Exchanger XML Editor. Conspicuously missing: PTC Arbortext Editor and XMetal. [NUDGE: C'mon big guys!]

The other exciting result of DocBook v5 and RelaxNG, is that it makes customization layers EXTREMELY easy to manage. The DocBook Subcommittee for Publishers proposed a new modularization of the RNC schemas for DocBook v5 to create Core DocBook and additional schema modules, which have now been incorporated into the v5 source. As a result, we've also been able to produce an initial draft of an official DocBook Publishers customization very easily!

This is great news for the entire DocBook TC and community!

DITA Learning Content specialization open for review!

The OASIS DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization Subcommittee is proud to announce the availability of our specification for DITA Learning Content for public review.

The design and language specification for the DITA learning and training content is available here, and the DITA Open Toolkit plugin with working DTD, XSD, DITA content samples, and documentation is available here.

The goal of the subcommittee is to develop a general top-level design for structured, intent-based authoring of learning content with good learning architecture, following DITA principles and best practices.

This specification was formally submitted to the full OASIS DITA Technical Committee today, after we completed the designs, samples, and language specifications for the learning topic types, the learning map domain, the learning interaction domain, and IEEE LOM learning metadata. The intention is to have this specification approved by the TC for inclusion in DITA 1.2, though most of this work is built on the existing DITA 1.1 infrastructure.

Please send any review comments via the public comment facility.

Doc Standards Interoperability Framework whitepaper now available!

Jim Earley and I have presented about the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework at XML 2006, DITA West 2007, Open Publish 2007, OASIS Symposium 2007 and DITA West 2007.

The whitepaper is now available at:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/downloads/Interoperability_Framework.pdf.
This whitepaper contains greater detail on the business case for interoperability, as well as specifics on the framework. If you are interested in exchanging content between DocBook, DITA, ODF and/or other document standards, you should definitely check it out!

We are still working on the charter for the proposed OASIS Doc Standards Interoperability TC. Hopefully we can get that finished soon to form the TC before year-end.

DITA 1.1 Officially Released!

It's been a lot of work, but we've finally released version 1.1 of DITA! I've been involved heavily in DITA 1.1, as well as the Learning Content specialization subcommittee.

The full press release is available here:
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-08-13.php

Key features of this release include:

• Enhanced print publishing capabilities with the new DITA Bookmap specialization, including extended book metadata.
• New elements (<index-see>, <index-see-also>, and <index-sort-as>) for "see" and "see-also" references.
• New elements (<abstract>, <data>) for defining structured metadata, as well as the ability to add new metadata attributes through specialization.
• New elements for image scaling.
• The glossary specialization, adding new elements for glossary entries.
• Support for foreign content vocabularies (<unknown> element)

UPDATE: The DITA OpenToolkit 1.4 has also been released, including support for DITA 1.1. For more information, please see:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=724798

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!

DITA 1.1 approved as Committee Draft!

The OASIS DITA TC has unanimously approved DITA 1.1 as a Committee Draft. The announcement for start of public review from OASIS should come soon.

This is an important achievement, as it includes the long-anticipated bookmap and glossary specializations and the following new extensibility features to the DITA standard:

• A bookmap specialization for encoding book-specific information in a DITA map
• A glossentry specialization for glossary entries
• Indexing specializations for see, see-also, page ranges, and sort order
• Improvements to graphic scaling capability
• Improved short description flexibility through a new element
• Specialization support for new global attributes, such as conditional processing attributes
• Support for integration of existing content structures through the <foreign> element
• Support for new kinds of information and structures through the <data> and <unknown> elements
• Formalization of conditional processing profiles

I will send out the URL to the Architectural Spec and Language Reference when they are posted to the public review site.

New Discussion List: OASIS DITA S1000D Interoperability

I've kicked off a new discussion list at OASIS to address interoperability between S1000D and DITA!

The address of this list is:
dita-s1000d-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org

Anyone, including OASIS members and non-members, may subscribe to this list in order to discuss the merits and possibility of the proposed project. The list is now open, and can be joined by sending a message to:
dita-s1000d-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org

Here is the official statement of scope:

DITA is an OASIS XML markup standard designed for topic-based authoring and re-use. It is also designed for interoperability, with a highly flexible specialization mechanism. For more information please see: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita

S1000D is also an XML markup standard designed for re-use. This standard is aimed primarily at civil and military equipment documentation. It is also focused on Data Modules and a Common Source Database. For more information please see: http://www.s1000d.org/

This discussion list is intended to facilitate an effort to graft S1000D type modules onto the DITA type hierarchy. The result would support content that's completely interoperable and provides a relatively good transform target (because of similar semantics and structure). This approach will have significant long-term benefits toward interoperability of content and authoring tools between the two standards.

Categories: DITA, S1000D, OASIS, standards, interoperability

It's Official! DocBook v4.5 is now an OASIS Standard!

As of October 1, 2006, DocBook v4.5 is an official OASIS Standard! The voting went right down to the wire, as many of the eligible voters had neglected to vote at all. However, of those voting, the approval was unanimous!

In other cool DocBook news, the upcoming UBL v2.0 OASIS Standard submission will include the DocBook "editable source!" Nice to see that some of the other standards are using DocBook as the basis for their documentation!

Categories: DocBook