The need to be aware of emerging specifications

During the S1000D Clearwater event mention was made of DITA and how it was modular and was used for documentation. By coincidence a fairly major DITA conference took place in the UK Recently (X-Pubs 2006). Readers may remember that I mentioned this back in April this year. By all accounts it was well attended and judging by the programme, which I pointed to last time, there must have been several very interesting presentations from the S1000D Standpoint.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend this even (yes I know it was only 200 miles or so away but other work made it impossible) but I want to make a comment on a couple of the presentations, one for upcoming interest to the S1000D providers and the other because it was about S1000D.

How to find the information in your Publication

The first item that I want to look at briefly is the presentation by Stephen Buxton of Mark Logic. His presentation was not actually about S1000D but it has some bearing on the Specification because of the obvious need for some method of searching complete system handbooks in a real and meaningful way.

Stephen has been involved with the Science (or is it Art) of searching data for sometime and he works for Mark Logic who are heavily involved in Content Management and the leverage that good control and searching gives over data access. I mention this because there is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation which covers the querying of XML based data. Called XQuery, I understand that some of the engines which are becoming available and which comply with earlier work by W3C (Stephen is on the committee) is indicating that searching XML data, even huge amounts of data can be a very rapid process.

Now I mention this because something that has been a source of concern for the end users of the S1000D IETP packages that are available has been the ease in which the data can be searched in a free way. Clearly this searching capability is not quite so important in a relatively small IETP but when we come to a system, say for example a ship such as an Aircraft Carrier, being able to find what you want is going to be a problem.

It clearly depends on how the information is put together. Back in 1990 I was demonstrating a keyboard less/mouse less navigation system (it used touch screen computers) which I implemented for a UK Electronic Handbook system. Access to data at all levels of the break down (yes the handbook was structured for different levels of equipment breakdown even then) enabled the user to get access to main information areas within seconds (there was not a table of contents using the graphical navigation method although one was available). But it did not have a search capability.

I will leave the searching for parts to another time perhaps, but with a good search engine based on XQuery this problem may well have been solved if the System documentation has been handled in a holistic way and not just piecemeal.

DITA and S1000D (or should it be S1000D and DITA)

Another presentation at the X-Pubs Technical Track was by Noz Urbina (yes he does work for Mekon) was entitled DITA v S1000D - A Comparison of Leading Modular Documentation Standards. This paper provided a very valuable comparison between S1000D and DITA and pointed out that there was good stuff in both tracks and to some extent, as I pointed out back in April, it was horses for courses.

I have seen the Presentation (and the notes associated with it) and Noz certainly gave a good account of the S1000D Specification. I hope that it has helped to make some DITA Experts think before making the assumption that DITA is the be all and end all of publication specifications.

Noz's presentation pointed out that the DITA community had got something to learn from the S1000D specification which is very well established and usable and maintained by an independent organisation.

I am trying to persuade him to write the presentation up as a White Paper so that it can be made available to a much wider audience.