Vasont Systems announced that a standard Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) setup is included with every installation of the Vasont Content Management System. Vasont’s standard DITA setup is included at no extra cost. Users can choose to install the optional DITA setup when installing Vasont. In addition, Vasont is able to support any industry-standard XML DTDs such as DocBook and S1000D. For users with complex content, Vasont also supports proprietary DTDs created to accommodate an organization’s specific business logic. Multiple DTDs can also be used in Vasont when one DTD doesn’t fit all of an organization’s content. http://www.vasont.com
Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 39 of 58)
Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.
Hopefully some of you tuned in to our webinar yesterday and have had a chance to read the companion whitepaper. My radio theme – or podcast if you are so inclined – for the title of this blog is intentional. In fact, I also toyed with “Mixing Content and Web 2.0” to illustrate “the remix factor” — an intrinsic part of the Web 2.0 “engaging the user” vision and one of the reasons why professors call O’Reilly Media’s SafariU “revolutionary.”
Remixing. Familiar to your teenagers and made famous by iTunes, but not a word well known in corporate circles. Using Web services and MarkLogic Server, O’Reilly delivers a user interface that allows higher education professors to reassemble – or remix – sections and chapters from a vast library of O’Reilly and partner books to, in CJ’s words, suit their needs. Suit their needs. Since when do software applications suit the user needs without the word “customization” being part of the equation?
In terms of content applications and Web 2.0, since now. Is this analogous to the radio industry’s evolution? Absolutely. Can it provide new revenue for publishers through a compelling product? Definitely. Ian Krantz over at the Really Strategies blog continues the conversation. And CJ Rayhill , O’Reilly’s Chief Information Officer and General Manager of O’Reilly’s Education Division, is obviously the source.
Yesterday, the webinar audience asked me what parts of the SafariU story are universally applicable. Read on to see what I said. Also, feel free to submit questions and comments here about what you read and hopefully listened to about the SafariU case study. (I will let you know when the archive is available). Let’s continue the conversation!
What O’Reilly success factors are universal?
“When the Gilbane team evaluates a customer story as a potential CTW case study, we specifically look for elements of the deployment that would benefit other adopters of content technologies. So, how can we generalize O’Reilly success? Here are a few key factors that are universal.
First, we could not agree more with the Web 2.0 principle that — Data (including O’Reilly’s atomized content term — is the next Intel Inside. Having spent over 20 years researching and writing about content technologies, The Gilbane Report has consistently focused on how content technology can be used for enterprise business applications and how content and computing will evolve. Today, the power of “content as a corporate asset” is clearly one of the success factors for a myriad of business applications, commercial products, and community and government services. The same can be said for the rising intersection between content, collaboration and community – technology is enabling it and SafariU has clearly delivered it.
Secondly, as XML enjoys its eighth birthday this month, its application to gold source content is evident throughout many industries. Although regularly applied to data exchange during its first five years, it is the more recent years that demonstrate the value of content intelligence, flexibility, and reuse as enabled by XML and sister standards like XQuery. This value is reaping significant ROI for those making the commitment and investment.
Finally, O’Reilly’s is engaging their customers in new ways while simultaneously delivering strategic improvements to higher education. Their approach demonstrates the power of CJ’s infrastructure quote when describing Mark Logic Server, which gives O’ Reilly the power to single source both their content and infrastructure expand into higher education today, and more verticals in the near future. These are universal factors that you can take back as input to your own content strategies.” Leonor Ciarlone
Microsoft’s InfoPath was announced with great fanfare in October 2003 as part of the Office 2003 release. Microsoft then included some enhancements to InfoPath in a Service Pack release (SP1) of Office, which was distributed in June 2004. Since then, there has been little news about InfoPath. The InfoPath team blog at the Microsoft Developer Network went quiet in early 2005, with its last post in November of 2005, which was an announcement of an InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005. There is a newish InfoPath tips-and-tricks blog by Microsoft blogger Tim Pash, but other than that, Microsoft has been very quiet about InfoPath. Does this suggest a reduced commitment by Microsoft?
UPDATE: As you can see from the comments, Microsoft appears to be plenty busy with InfoPath. See also this post from Eric Richards, who is a development lead on Microsoft Office.
Hopefully you got to hear Mary and Bill on today’s radio show. Next up is Leonor, who will join O’Reilly’s C.J. Rayhill in a webinar next Wednesday, February 15 at 2:00pm EST to talk about how O’Reilly Media expanded into the textbook publishing market by creating a custom publishing platform that enables educators to produce more targeted and less expensive teaching materials using MarkLogic Server.
See more details or Register today.
Also see Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg’s blog post.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention you can read Leonor’s case study!
Some of you have likely listened to the excellent technology radio show at MyTechnologyLawyer.com. Gilbane Report Senior Editor Mary Laplante and I will be talking about the upcoming Gilbane San Francisco conferences on content management and digital rights management. The interview will be at 1:00 Eastern time tomorrow, Thursday, February 9, and you can listen live here.
UPDATE: If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to recorded versions here (Real Media) or here (Windows Media). Among the topics discussed at some length were DITA and Enterprise DRM.
We have published our latest DITA white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies: Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The paper focuses on the remarkable success Adobe and Autodesk have had in transforming their product documentation from unstructured content to DITA-structured content. In the process, they are saving money, developing better documentation and Help, and globalizing their content much more efficiently. Read all about it…
The recording of the DITA Webinar is now available online. Follow this link and then click on the link, “View All Recorded Events.” You can access the full set of Webinar slides here (PDF).
One of the themes of the Webinar was the use of DITA in applications beyond technical documentation and product support content. Paul Wlodarczyk of Blast Radius discussed applications of other, customer-facing content that could be structured in DITA. These include product descriptions on the e-Commerce site, including user-authored product reviews, bulletins and best practices on the customer support site, and sources like fault trees in a contact center knowledge base. DITA makes sense in these applications because of the value of such content–and the likely need to localize it.
Are people seeing other applications of DITA beyond technical documentation per se? Feel free to comment here and let us know.
I have written in the past about how some of the business information aggregators are using XBRL in their financial offerings. Edgar Online today announced that it has extended one of its core product offerings, i-Metrix, allowing users to process content into XBRL format. This kind of commercial application of XBRL is more proof of user demand–and that businesses are finding value in doing the hard work of this kind of data transformation and analysis.
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