French working group on DITA and S1000D

[Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>]

Don and Eric and I have been communicating with Jean-Jacques Thomasson, and he is willing to attend the TC on 31 July to provide fuller information about this work effort.

Here is content from the original e-mail:


Following the work on the re engineering of the DITA XML Schemas, a group of DITA and S1000D experts has been created in March which started to work on the
subject of the possible convergence of the schemas of DITA and S1000D.

Indeed, it appeared that the new schemas proposed for DITA could easily cover, or embed, the ones of S1000D, opening an exceptional path for those two standards to converge instead of diverging with possibilities of new extensions and applications for both.

Software editors could be (very) interested in developing common mechanisms and software tools for both standards instead of having two different series of products.
Customers also would appreciate this initiative.

Our group is composed of Nicolas Dupuy (PTC, also co-chair of the S1000D EPWG), Guillemette Borrel (Senior consultant at LGM), Michel Doméon (Dassault-Aviation, also ex-co chairman of S1000D Steering Committee elected at this position by GIFAS representing the French Aerospace & Defence industries), Philippe Zingoni of Antea (an old well-known French company acting in the XML software business) and myself, governing the work of this group.

The group has started its work on different directions, in particular on technical points (proof of concept) and business interest (business case). Due to the long history of S1000D and its experience with XML Schema, DITA can take benefits from the software tools existing for S1000D : creation of canonical XML schemas, converters of XML schemas to DTD (we also want to look at Relax NG and Schematron), data dictionary and others while S1000D needs new possibilities of customization.

So far, we have reached the point where the full set of S1000D modules can be embedded in one DITA publication aside with DITA topics. We have also made demonstrations of having new specialization and domains based on the new models (those I have proposed for version 2 of DITA). We are now going to study the possibility of having DITA topics embedded with S1000D modules in one S1000D publication.

Our group intends to be transparent and shares this initiative with you and anybody wishing to contribute, we think that we will be ready to present a paper in early September.

Best regards

Jean-Jacques Thomasson
Euriware Senior Consultant
Areva Grp Senior Expert in Techdoc Management

-- 
Best,
 
Kris
 
Kristen James Eberlein
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
Co-chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)