DITA Help Branding ... an issue in search of a home

[stan@modularwriting.com]

Greetings!

On behalf of the DITA Help Subcommittee, I took an action item at the last DITA Technical Committee meeting to draft an email to the membership of the DITA TC, the DITA Adoption TC, the DITA Help Subcommittee, and Mary McCrae regarding an issue that is beyond the scope of our subcommittee efforts and needs a suitable home somewhere in OASIS. 

Here's the context ... being good doobies, the Help subcommittee wished to refine its focus on DITA Help in specific terms. Here is the definition of "DITA Help" that Tony Self has drafted.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------
  Definition of DITA Help
  This topic details how the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee defines the 
  term DITA Help.

  DITA Help, as defined by the OASIS DITA Help SC (DHSC), is:

  A set of recommendations for the design and implementation of
  commonly recognized user assistance components using the DITA
  architecture. These components include, but are not limited to,
  navigation components, context-sensitive linking, embedded Help,
  browse sequences, associative links, window definitions. The
  recommendations can be used as a foundation for the development of
  authoring models and tools to support solutions in a variety of
  formats and for a variety of platforms.
  -------------------------------------------------------------------

In this framework, "DITA Help" will never be associated with a singular Help implementation using DITA directly or indirectly as source. 

Here's the rub ... regardless of whatever we (DITA TC Help Subcommittee) think about keeping "DITA Help" semantically distinct from any particular commercial or open source Help implementation, there would seem to be little to prevent or to discourage a company from trademarking "DITA Help" or "DITAHelp". Inmedius, for example, has a trademark for "DITA Storm" and (perhaps) "DITAStorm". We had been assuming that the term DITA is a trademark of OASIS or IBM, but that is not evident from the OASIS sites that I checked (http://www.oasis-open.org/who/trademark.php). If there is anything that we need to do proactively to "protect" the term "DITA Help", we would love to get advice and counsel accordingly. If not, it would be nice to know that as well. 

Anyway, we are neither lawyers nor venture capitalists so we wished to pass along to someone else in OASIS the issue of DITA branding. 

Stan Doherty
Secretary, DITA TC Help Subcommittee
Member, DITA TC