RE: [dita] Re: Comparison between DITA and S1000D

["Tsao, Scott" <scott.tsao@boeing.com>]

Eliot,

Are you suggesting a decoupling of DITA into two parts:
1) Topic-oriented vocabulary
2) Specialization-based mechanism

If that is the case, may I recast John's enumeration of the key
distinguishing characteristics of DITA as follows:
1) For topic-oriented vocabulary, one could potentially use existing
DITA information type & domain to model 
   all of the S1000D:
   a) Information types (e.g., Description, Procedural, Maintenance
schedules, Fault Isolation, 
      Crew/operators, and IPD) 
   b) Domain vocabularies (e.g., loading/off-loading procedures,
munitions descriptions, safety, emergency, 
      etc.)
2) For specialization-based mechanism, one could reap the following
benefits:
   a) Specialization with a fallback
   b) Processing reuse

As John said: "Modeling all of the details of S1000D with DITA topic and
domain specializations would be a 
large task," are you suggesting that one could potentially reap the
benefits of the second without doing
the first?

Am I interpreting your comments correctly?

Thanks,

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber@innodata-isogen.com] 
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 2:12 PM
To: john_hunt@us.ibm.com
Cc: dita@lists.oasis-open.org; Tsao, Scott; ehunnum@us.ibm.com
Subject: Re: [dita] Re: Comparison between DITA and S1000D


john_hunt@us.ibm.com wrote:

> DITA, however, has several key distinguishing characteristics, 
> compared
> with S1000D:
> 
> 1) Information type specialization.

Rather than comparing DITA and S1000D at the element type level, it 
might be more productive to simply retrofit the DITA class mechanism to 
S1000D--this would provide much of the unique value of DITA compared to 
S1000D (since both provide comparable content structures) and could be 
done without affecting any existing applications or document instances.

This is one reason I pushed for breaking the specialization mechanism 
out as a separate specification--it has tremendous value independent of 
the value of DITA's topic-based vocabulary and could be usefully applied

to any information types.

That is, there is a general requirement for some sort of architecture 
mechanism, at least for technical documentation (if not for all XML 
applications), and DITA provides just such a mechanism in a form that is

both well adapted for the XML Web-based world, that is proven in 
practice, and that requires minimal extra effort to use and implement.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9390 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 372-8122

eliot@innodata-isogen.com
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