DRAFT: DITA v1.1 Announcement

[Stan Doherty <Stanley.Doherty@Sun.COM>]

Hi all --

For your consideration tomorrow at the TC meeting, here is my draft of a 
DITA v1.1 announcement.

Enjoy!

Stan Doherty
Greetings --

OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has approved DITA v1.1 (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture) as an OASIS standard. The members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and members of the many companies and user groups testing DITA 1.1 have made significant improvements to the DITA bookmap specialization, to translation support, to metadata handling across the boards, and to overall scalability. To review an overview of the many new features in DITA v1.1, see the following web site:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/overview/overview.html

DITA has emerged not only a singular publishing technology that large and small companies have deployed, it is also one of the a suite of OASIS standards for open-source publishing:
- OASIS DocBook
- OASIS Open Document Format (ODF)
- OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
With the formal approval of the DITA v1.1 standard, the collective strength of this suite is enhanced. Although no one of these OASIS standards solves every publishing requirement in every company, this suite of standards addresses the vast majority of requirements and advances the adoption of all three. 

OASIS encourages its members and the many organizations who have deployed its technologies to consider the business and publishing challenges addressed directly by the DITA v1.1 standard:
- Single sourcing (books, help, training, multimedia)
- Translation
- Information reuse between products and groups 
  a company or academinc institution 
- Information reuse and collaboration between a company 
  and its business partners
- Leveraged tools and infrastructure (industry-standard
  interfaces)
- Leveraged employee training 
- Scalability

The acceptance of DITA v1.1 as an OASIS standard is important to us in the publishing community and to those who wish to see OASIS' leadership role in publishing technologies continue to flourish.