Interoperability Framework presentation at DITA West 2007

Jim Earley and I presented the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework at DITA West 2007 yesterday.

Despite the somewhat low turnout at the conference overall (especially given the number of DITA user groups and high tech companies in the Bay Area!), our attendees included several members of the DITA TC, including: Erik Hennum (keynote speaker at DITA West 2007), France Baril and Yas Etessam.

Erik spoke very favorably of our approach and had a number of technical-level questions during the Question and Answer time. France Baril had some concerns from a DITA purist perspective regarding what kind of content this would open up.

This approach opens up access to content that might have been difficult to integrate otherwise. To address France's concerns, while this framework enables non-DITA content to be brought into DITA topics, there is no reason that you cannot treat this as a "stub" to then provide additional enhancements according to DITA best practices. I think her main concern is that the content may not follow some of the key information architecture designs from DITA (it may be dirty DITA), but this approach does not prevent you from then "cleaning" the content up to purist DITA standards. It really is an enabling mechanism.

This "content enablement" and interoperability is especially important in partner, OEM and cross-organizational content relationships, not to mention the reality of mergers and acquisitions.

We will be posting our whitepaper and slides to the docstandards-interop-tech list and the Flatirons Solutions website shortly.

Thanks to all who attended!

UPDATE: I've posted a copy of our presentation to the Flatirons Solutions site here.

XML Block Party at DITA West 2007!

I'm at the DITA West 2007 conference this week. It has been great to meet some of my fellow DITA TC members in person, such as Yas Etessam, France Baril, Amber Swope, Kay Ethier, Kate Wilhelm and Erik Hennum.

The highlight of the conference, however, has to go to Mr. Paul Masalsky of EMC. He gave a very informative presentation on deploying DITA for the enterprise, but in the middle of the presentation, gave an XML Block Party rap for DITA. He had everyone in the room almost in tears! The rap was quite clever and he displayed a lot of bravery to add beat box to the mix.

while it may seem a bit demented, it's topic-oriented!

:-)

P.S. If you are around San Jose tomorrow, my colleague Jim Earley and I will be presenting our Doc Standards Interoperability Framework. Hope you can make it!

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jim!

My colleague, Jim Earley, has started a blog at: http://jims-thoughtspot.blogspot.com/index.html.

Jim and I will be co-presenting on a "Document Standards Interoperability Framework for DITA, DocBook, ODF and more" at DITA 2007 West.

Jim is an outstanding guy, and fellow DocBook, DITA and XSLT nerd to boot!

Flatirons Solutions will also be giving a demo of our Dynamic Content Delivery Solution, built on Mark Logic. It's a very cool application, that I had the pleasure of working on.

If you are going to be in the San Jose area next week, you should really consider dropping by! Hope to see you there!