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Subject: Need for more generic publication map vocabulary (Proposal 13032)
My argument is thus: 1. Bookmap is not sufficiently flexible or general to support the needs of many, if not most, publications. Because it is a map *type* and not a map *domain*, it cannot be extended or otherwise used with other map types. It imposes constraints that are too restrictive for many publications, certainly for most, not all, Publishing documents, and for many technical publications as well. It's design does not support representing publications as trees of submaps (for example, you cannot have a bookmap map with a root topicref type of <chapter>). 2. Therefore, the DITA community needs a more general map type that is specifically for publications (that is, units of publishing) and reasonably expects the TC to provide it, given that the TC previously provided Bookmap and Learning Map. 3. The L&T learning map and learning metadata domains demonstrate a much more flexible pattern for map specializations, one that allows a much greater range of specialization and configuration options. In particular, by separating the publication metadata from the publication structure, it avoids one of the key problems of Bookmap, namely underspecified metadata and allows combining the specialized topicrefs with other map types. 4. Thus we need three new vocabulary modules that together serve as the base for publication maps: - A publication metadata domain that provides a greater range of metadata options, of which the DITA for Publishers pubmetadataDomain serves as an example and starting point. - A publication map domain that provides a wide set of topicref types representing all the different things that might occur in a publication. The DITA for Publishers pubmapDomain serves as an example and starting point. - A publication map document map type that combines the two domains as an example of how to combine them to define a working publication structure. Given 4 it would be possible to define the functional equivalent of Bookmap as a specialization of Pubmap, as an exercise in showing how the domains can be used. I feel strongly this type of generic publication map is not Publishing specific, so while it could be provided unilaterally by the DITA for Publishers project, I think it's very important for this type of generic map model to be part of the TC-provided vocabulary so that it is obviously available to the community and serves as a normative model for more-specialized map vocabulary. Cheers, Eliot -- Eliot Kimber Senior Solutions Architect "Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together" Main: 512.554.9368 www.reallysi.com www.rsuitecms.com
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