DOCBOOK-APPS: Another request: implementation with Slide info

["Boos, Paul M." <PAUL.M.BOOS@saic.com>]

Besides requesting info on example implementation uses for IT policy and
Specs, my team is currently looking at managing DocBook using Slide.  I was
wondering if others are using Slide.

Here is an overview of our thoughts on what we are trying to do:  

We have a distributed set of content authors that will be creating IT
Policy/Development Guidance.  Currently this is done entirely within an
"electronic paper" document (MS-Word).  This is messy as essentially one
person must finally bring it all together.  Our thoughts are to use slide
and manage the discrete pieces of the content from the applicable authors.
This will also allow updates to occur asynchronously (currently we publish
document releases, but in the future we hope releases will be irrelevant as
people will simply update the discrete document pieces as needed).

This leads me to a few questions:

DocBook lends itself well to a document with sections - how easy is it to
update content within only one section/article/chapter without downloading
the full document?

Has anyone done any work to extract metadata from Slide to populate some of
the attributes or elements within DocBook?

Finally, we have been looking at editors that are either Java applets or
Java applications - Ekit is what we are leaning to as it integrates the
Jazzy spellchecker.  I need to allow the users to author their pieces of the
document in a WYSIWYG fashion and then roll it into the DocBook "document".
I must be able to keep the formatting, but in some cases, I would like to
capture some of the additional information that may be contained within it
(example that it is an acronym or that it is an example of a block of code).
Anyone have any recommendations?  Currently, I am thinking we will have to
modify the editor to add special identifying marks to it.

Thanks again in advance for any assistance - hopefully this will spark some
lively discussion as to design considerations for my team of 3 people... :-)

Paul