Issues and Actions Items From September Europe and East Coast Listening Sessions

["Dr. Stanley Doherty" <stan@modularwriting.com>]

Hi all --

Here are the enumerated issues and action items. 

We need to review the West Coast notes. 

Stan 
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Europe - Listening Session #1
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ISSUE-1: Integrating non-DITA resources.

ISSUE-2: Information modeling for an in DITA should be more easy to perform
and well documented. 

ISSUE-4: As teams approach making a commitment to DITA, they need 
to be made aware of what will be expensive (PDF customization) and
what will be less expensive. Need better technical input into 
the business model. Need better pointers to existing resources
on the expensive things. 

ISSUE-5: Some sort of Best Practices whitepaper introducing DITA
neophytes top the range of DITA resources is still needed. 

ISSUE-6: Interoperability between DITA metadata structures and the
industry standards for metadata is weak. At a minimum, the TC 
should document current and best practices for exchanging
metadata with SKOS, RDFa, IDF, and Dublin Core. 

ISSUE-7: It is difficult to identify English and translated 
version of the same topic, especially if the topic @ids change.
Perhaps some research on translation best practices in this 
area would help. 

ISSUE-08: The subjectScheme and Classification documentation
is not useful, rendering the technology unusable. Can the TC
or ATC write a how-to guide for what is currently in DITA 1.3. 

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North America - East - Listening Session #2
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ISSUE-09: Lightweight DITA is missing a few features that would
make it useful (the slippery slope). Stan and Keith to follow 
up with Rodolfo to get additional detail/examples. 

ISSUE-10: The DITA TC should provide recommendations or best
practices re: organizing DITA source files in a traditional 
filesystem. Poorly organized source structures hit translation
teams pretty hard. 

ISSUE-11: The Adoption TC should consider an whitepaper about
filesystem versus CCMS tradeoffs. Keith indicated that he 
was working on something in this area. See Radu's GitHub 
guidelines about organizing DITA sources. 
ISSUE-12: OOTB DITA reference topics do not support large-image
aviation tables (themselves images). Forced to use a generic
topic. Scott has this one.

ISSUE-12: The TC or ATC need to develop a whitepaper explaining 
the type sof costs that a typical team doing a DITA migration 
are likely to encounter, e.g. staffing, architects, training, 
tooling, customizations, infrastructure, etc.. It ain't all
free downloads and few evenings reading the spec and 
DITA-OT docs.