Charter Revision

["Dick Hamilton" <rlhamilton@frii.com>]

I have attached a revision of the charter based
on the comments from last month's TC meeting.

I believe I have incorporated all of the comments;
if I missed something, please let me know.

Regards,
Dick Hamilton
---------------------------------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net

Title: OASIS DocBook Technical Committee Charter

The charter for this TC is as follows.

Name

OASIS DocBook Technical Committee.

Statement of Purpose

Almost all computer hardware and software developed around the world needs some documentation. For the most part, this documentation has a similar structure and a large core of common idioms. The community benefits from having a standard, open, interchangeable vocabulary in which to write this documentation. DocBook has been, and will continue to be, designed to satisfy this requirement. For more than a decade, DocBook has provided a structured markup vocabulary for just this purpose.

DocBook is now widely used in both commercial and Open Source environments including Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, GNOME, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Linux Technology Center, KDE, Linux Documentation Project, Mandriva, PHP, Red Hat, SUSE, Subversion, and Sun Microsystems, to name just a few.

The OASIS DocBook Technical Committee is chartered to develop and maintain the DocBook family of specifications and to continue to support its ever growing user base. In particular, the XML DocBook schema, a simplified authoring subset, and a variant for the publishing industry.

The normative version of the DocBook Version 5.0 schema will be delivered using the RelaxNG schema language with additional constraints specified in Schematron. The Technical Committee may support other schema languages as appropriate, and may develop additional modules and derived document types.

Scope of Work

The TC is engaged in evolving the suite of DocBook specifications. The scope of DocBook is computer hardware and software documentation. Broadly, this includes both print and online tutorial and reference documentation as well as online help, user guides, exercises and other ancillary forms of documentation.

This effort will deliver on the following goals:

• Evolve DocBook using the most appropriate schema languages.
• Address issues and enhancement requests that arise from experience with real-world DocBook implementations.
• Add support for features that were deferred from previous versions of DocBook.

Most requests for enhancement that are not motivated by a requirement in computer hardware or software documentation are considered out of scope for the committee. However, the committee may address needs in related domains through extensions or variants, and may commission sub-committees to focus on related domains. It is not a goal of the Technical Committee to expand the scope of DocBook to include additional, unrelated problem domains.

The OASIS DocBook Publishers SubCommittee develops and maintains official variants of DocBook to support the publishing industry.

List of Deliverables

The TC expects to update the DocBook family of specifications to reflect issues and enhancements adopted by the TC. Our current timeline for this evolution is:

Q4 2008

• The DocBook XML Document Type, V5.0

Q1 2009

• The DocBook Publishers Schema, V1.0
• Simplified DocBook, V1.2

Q3 2009

• The DocBook XML Document Type, V5.1

Additional documents may also be produced at the Committee's discretion. The TC's intent is to pursue OASIS Standard status for major DocBook revisions.

Audience

The primary audience for the final output of this TC is structured documentation system architects, implementers, authors, publishers, and users.

Language of the TC

All business of the TC will be conducted in English.