DITA For Publishers: New Community Project

Publishers are starting to take DITA very seriously and Really Strategies has been in the forefront of that trend as champions of Publishing requirements on the DITA Technical Committee and within the larger DITA community, as practitioners developing solutions and approaches for applying DITA to Publishing business problems, and as tool developers creating software solutions that support the Publishing use of DITA.

Out of the work that we've done over the last couple of years we have developed a number of basic Publishing-specific DITA components that are completely generic. We also started to realize that for Publishers to realize the maximum value from their use of DITA there would need to be a common starting point that Publishers could leverage, avoiding the need to re-invent things everyone needs. Eventually Publishers will need formal representation in the DITA standardization process, once there is sufficient Publishing community involvement.

To that end Really Strategies has sponsored the creation of a new community-based, open-source project: DITA For Publishers (dita4publishers.sourceforge.net).

The DITA For Publishers project is intended to provide a set of Publishing-specific DITA element types tailored to the task of representing typical Publishing documents, such as commercial fiction and non-fiction, magazines and other types of periodicals, travel and nature guides, and so on. These are documents that have fundamentally different content requirements and business processes compared to the technical documents to which DITA has traditionally been applied.

The DITA For Publishers project is still very new but it already provides some useful pieces any Publisher would need for a DITA-based XML system:

• A Publishing-specific DITA map type: pubmap, designed to enable representation of all types of Publishing documents, including documents with arbitrary or idiosyncratic content organization
• Basic Publishing-specific topic types for articles, book parts, book chapters, generic subsections, and sidebars. These topic types enable the natural and intuitive representation of most existing publications within a DITA context.
• Publishing-specific support domain (mix-in element types) for representing the sort of arbitrary formatting requests that are an unavoidable reality of Publishing.
• Basic extensions to the DITA Open Toolkit to support the Publishing-specific element types.
• A new EPub-creating plugin to the DITA Open Toolkit that enables the creation of reader-ready electronic books from DITA-based content, with specific support for publication maps.
• Sample Publishing-type documents that demonstrate how to use the DITA For Publishers element types. The first such sample is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from Project Gutenberg, marked up as a pubmap and a set of chapter topics.
• How-to information on how to apply DITA and DITA-based technology to common Publishing document types and business problems.

The materials are packaged for download and ready to be used with the latest versions of the DITA Open Toolkit and DITA-aware editors.

DITA For Publishers is a community project, which means it needs and depends on and welcomes involvement and contributions from the entire community of Publishers. Immediate needs for the project are:

• Statements of requirements from Publishers: What information structuring challenges do you have that you would need or expect a DITA-based solution to solve?
• Sample Publishing documents that can be used to test and demonstrate the DITA For Publishing specializations and supporting tools (see my free data conversion offer below).
• Implementation support: there is always a need for programmers to contribute to the development of generic support components (transforms, etc.).

For Publishing document samples, my general offer is:

If you, the Publisher, will provide:

• Electronic source and final form of one or more Publishing documents
• An appropriate non-copyright license, such as a Creative Commons non-commercial license, for those documents as served by the DITA For Publishers project through the project's Web site (dita4publishers.sourceforge.net) (so that the DITA For Publishing project can make the source and rendered forms freely available for at least non-commercial use).

I will provide:

• Conversion of the content to DITA-based XML using the Publishing For DITA markup as appropriate
• The resulting XML back to you, the Publisher, with your original copyright retained, for you to do with as you will.
• Such renditions as I can produce with the tools at hand (e.g., HTML, EPub, PDF using XSL-FO)

In the unlikely event I get inundated with samples, I retain the right to cry "uncle".

Note that this is an offer of free data conversion at the small cost of providing a non-exclusive, non-commercial-use license for the content. The value to the DITA For Publishing project is the chance to develop both a larger body of illustrative examples and practical experience with representing Publishing documents.