"DITAworks is an Eclipse based solution which is built on DITA architecture and supports collaborative modeling, maintaining, publishing of complex documentation arrays."

*instinctools GmbH
Home Forum Blog Product Contact
Entries RSSEntries RSS   Entries RSSComments RSS

Posts Tagged ‘Specialization’

Recorded webinar on “DITA Specialization: Tools for Visual Support” available

Friday, July 9th, 2010 by Amit Tejpaul

On June 10, 2010, we had organized a webinar on the topic “DITA Specialization: Tools for Visual Support”. We would like to thank all the participants for their enthusiasm in attending the webinar.

In this webinar, Alexej Spas talked about how the otherwise complicated activity of DITA specialization can be handled comfortably in a visual way. The benefits of having infrastructure support for DITA specialization in terms of model validation, import, export and integration with version control and documentation environment were also talked about. The webinar was structured as follows:

  • Traditional approach to doing DITA Specializations
  • Main challenges in doing DITA Specializations
  • Traditional vs. Visual Specialization/Benefits of visual over traditional Specializations
  • Demo by doing an example Specialization using visual tools

For those who had missed the webinar or those who want to go through it again, we have uploaded the webinar at:

Webinar: Tools for Visual support for Doing DITA Specializations

The presentation slides for the webinar are separately available at:

http://www.slideshare.net/instinctools/dita-specialization-tools-for-visual-support


Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Webinars/Events | No Comments »

DITA Visual Specialization Manager released

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

On 14th of December our development team finished working on release of first public version of DITA Visual Specialization Manager.

DITA Visual Specialization Manager contains comprehensive modeling functions. In productivity area, it provides benefits in terms of lesser time, optimal quality of deliverables, and single-sourcing of the model by its ability to export DTD and XML Schema. The main features of this application are listed as follows:

  • Wizard-based Visual Editor for DITA specializations with support of structural, domain and attribute specializations
  • Import of existing specializations from DTD
  • DITA model validation (checking for validity of specialization)
  • Export of managed specializations to DTD or XML Schema
  • Export of Specializations in the form of DITA OT plug-in
  • Integration with version control

All these benefits and functionalities have been developed to give substantial support to Information Architects and Documentation Project Managers in designing and maintaining their DITA specializations. It is done by providing a wizard-based visual editor for DITA information
types. The development of these functionalities has been made possible through a mix of technological expertise and practical experience gained from various DITA projects.

Besides the standard commercial license for DITA Visual Specialization Manager, *instinctools offers a free-of-cost non-commercial license for development and maintenance of publicly available DITA Specializations and a time-limited evaluation license.

For first information on working with DITA Visual Specialization Manager for typical modeling tasks, we have provided tutorial videos for creating Model Projects, Shell DTDs, Structural and Domain DITA Specialization, and Export to DTD and DITA Open Toolkit on website: http://www.ditaworks.com/Vids.

Downloads for DITA Visual Specialization Manager (for evaluation and
non-commercial free-of-charge use) are available from http://www.ditaworks.com/dl.

For more information about DITA Visual Specialization Manager, please
visit http://www.ditaworks.com/modeling or write to info@instinctools.com.

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | No Comments »

Functional Preview of DITA Visual Specialization Manager

Monday, December 7th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

Our development team is now actively working on release of first version of DITA Visual Specialization Manager (DVSM) that allows management of DITA Specializations in visual and easy way (for more details see: http://www.ditaworks.com/modeling/).

DITA Visual Specialization Manager is planned to be released this week, but now you have a possibility to get a first preview of available functionality by watching some fresh screen casts published on DITAworks website. These demos cover following functions of DVSM:

We are looking forward for your feedbacks on features presented there.

I remind that DITA Visual Specialization Manager will be available free-of-cost for non-commercial usage and for architects developing DITA models that are publically accessible.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Coming soon, Features | No Comments »

*instinctools to provide DITA Visual Specialization Manager free-of-charge

Friday, November 6th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

*instinctools GmbH has decided to provide free-of-cost licenses for its DITA Visual Specialization Manager, an application designed to make complex DITA specialization tasks easier to work with. These free licenses will be valid for unlimited time period but limited to the development and maintenance of open DITA Specializations e.g. specializations under OASIS for different industries such as Machine, Pharmaceutical etc. This offer is aimed at lowering the barriers to DITA usage and adoption. (more…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Coming soon, News | No Comments »

Common errors in DITA specializations

Saturday, March 28th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

DITA as information architecture can be seen as a set of best practices for topic-oriented authoring. Besides providing a set of DTDs and rules for authoring, DITA also defines a way to design new information structures customized through custom semantics. This is achieved by process of specialization.

Specialization opens a new dimension for customizing DITA to needs of different enterprises. But doing a valid specialization is not a trivial process. It requires rather deep understanding of DITA internals and command in technologies like DTD, XML Schema and s.o.

But even with sufficient knowledge of DTD (or XML Schema) coding, doing a valid specialization requires knowledge of certain DITA principles and rules. Just designing a valid DTD will not necessarily mean that you have a valid DITA model. More on Specializations can be read here: http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/archspec/ditaspecialization.html

This article discusses some common problems and pitfalls people face when they do DITA 1.1 specializations . (more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Problems and Solutions | No Comments »

DITA Models single-sourcing: Why not?

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 by Alexej Spas

It is a well known fact that DITA is a great information architecture that enables single source publishing of content into different formats. “Write once and use everywhere” is a motto of it. But when it comes to DITA definition itself and DITA specializations, we have to make decisions about format we want to maintain our models in. We need to choose between DTD or XML Schema. Once this decision is made and the model is developed, it is quite a time consuming operation to change chosen format and in most cases, people would stay with originally selected format because of the effort and time involved.

DITA itself has to be supported in both formats in parallel.

But why not consider single-sourcing of DITA models? I think this would be logical step following the single-sourcing philosophy of DITA.

(more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Problems and Solutions | 2 Comments »




Copyright © 2008-2010 * instinctools GmbH