DocBook Publishers Schema Version 1.0 now available for public review

Well, we finally got all the i's dotted and the t's crossed! The DocBook Publishers schema is available for public review. This is an effort I chaired to support the needs we've seen in the publishing industry.

Many publishers spend considerable amounts of time and money developing and maintaining their own custom schemas and output rendering. This standard tries to address the unique needs of publishers, while building upon a standards-based platform to reduce cost and ensure consistency. Key publishers involved in this effort have included: O'Reilly, John Wiley and Sons, and Penguin UK, so this was not developed in a vacuum either!

Here's the notice from OASIS:

The OASIS DocBook TC has recently [January 2009] approved the following specification as a Committee Draft and approved the package for public review:

The DocBook Publishers Schema Version 1.0

The public review starts today, 2 July 2009, and ends 31 August 2009. This is an open invitation to comment. We strongly encourage feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of OASIS work. Please feel free to distribute this announcement within your organization and to other appropriate mail lists.

More non-normative information about the specification and the technical committee may be found at the public home page of the TC at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=docbook. Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person through the use of the OASIS TC Comment Facility which can be located via the button marked "Send A Comment" at the top of that page, or directly at: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=docbook .

Submitted comments (for this work as well as other works of that TC) are publicly archived and can be viewed at: http://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.

The specification document and related files are available here:

Editable Source:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/specs/publishers-1.0-spec-cd-01.xml

PDF:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/specs/publishers-1.0-spec-cd-01.pdf

HTML:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/specs/publishers-1.0-spec-cd-01.html

Schema:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/rng/publishers/publishers.rnc

OASIS and the DocBook TC welcome your comments.

You can also take a look at all of our content samples on SourceForge here:
http://docbook.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docbook/trunk/docbook/relaxng/publishers

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

DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers approved!

I am very pleased to announce the formation of a DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers was approved by the DocBook TC during yesterday's meeting. The charter as approved is a as follows:

OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers

Background

For more than a decade, DocBook has provided a structured markup vocabulary for hardware and software documentation. DocBook is now widely used in both commercial and Open Source environments. DocBook has a very broad element set, and applies to much more than just technical documentation. The DocBook TC is engaged in evolving the suite of DocBook specifications. The community benefits from having a standard, open, interchangeable vocabulary in which to write structured content. DocBook has been, and will continue to be, designed to satisfy this requirement.

The OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers is chartered to develop and maintain official variants of DocBook in support of the publishing industry. Specifically, the subcommittee will focus on schema and stylesheet customizations to support: periodicals as regularly published technical notes or journals, book publishing (such as business, legal, medical, and other non-technical domains), educational textbooks and other document types as appropriate for this industry.

Scope of Work

This subcommittee will submit additional enhancements back to the full DocBook standard as appropriate. The scope of this DocBook subcommittee is publishing industry content. Broadly, this includes books, journals and other related publications.

This effort will deliver on the following goals:

• Build official DocBook variants, based against the DocBook v5.0 schemas.
• Address issues and enhancement requests that have arisen from experience with real-world DocBook implementations.
• Add support for features specific to the publishing industry.

If you are a Publisher, and would like to be involved, please let me know! I have a good-size core group of about 8 folks at this point, but would be interested in all the industry expertise we can gather!

Dynamic Publishing with DITA

With DITA's modular, reusable information elements, you can not only publish across different formats and media - but also flexibly recombine information in almost any way you like.

Initial DITA implementations have focused primarily on publishing to pre-defined PDF, HTML and Help formats - basically static publishing with DITA. The real promise of DITA, however, lies in supporting dynamic, personalized content delivery.

At Flatirons Solutions, we've developed a very cool application on top of Mark Logic to enable this dynamic publishing. We've written a whitepaper about it here:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/Downloads/Whitepaper_DCD_Using_DITA.pdf
This whitepaper defines a new publishing paradigm, which we will call dynamic content delivery. Dynamic delivery changes the rules, putting the reader in charge of what content is important and how it should be packaged. It transforms publishing to an audience of many to publishing to an "audience of one".

What's Inside:

• Static vs. Dynamic Publishing
• DITA: Dynamic Assembly of Topics
• A Scalable Approach to Dynamic Content Delivery
• A Complete DITA Publishing Solution
• Bottom Line Benefits