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More DITA: Another Interesting Case Study

I am continuing to look into DITA, and will be speaking with some folks at Autodesk next week who have implemented DITA. In the meantime, you can look at a presentation the implementation team gave at STC this past May.

My thanks to the reader (in the comment below) who caught the bad link. I fixed it. Click here for the Powerpoint or here for Google’s HTML-ized version of the Powerpoint.

2 Comments

  1. Jerry

    Hi, link to the powerpoint isn’t working. Can you repost?
    Thanks,
    Jerry

  2. Eric Severson

    Hi Bill,
    At Flatirons, we are working on several real-world projects that also provide some interesting case studies. One is a migration from DocBook to DITA for a large hardware manufacturer, supporting an application that automatically assembles personalized user manuals from XML fragments, based on questions answered on the Web. This was originally designed by us using DocBook, but we designed our DocBook in a very “DITA-like” fashion that makes it easy to migrate. This application is interesting because it challenges the notion that DocBook is always monolithic and book-oriented vs. topic-oriented DITA. DITA is more flexible and the better choice, but DocBook can be very topic-oriented as well. I hope to be writing a whitepaper on this soon. The second application is for scholarly research at BYU, and uses TEI as a formal specialization of DITA. This application, on which I’ll be speaking at XML 2005, is interesting because it really pushes DITA “to the limits” and exposes some interesting constraints in the process. While we successfully married DITA and TEI, we were unable to do this as a domain specialization (as we wanted to), and instead were forced to do this as a topic (structural) specialization. The exact reasons why are interesting and are described in detail in my XML 2005 whitepaper.

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