[Apologies for cross-posting]
The Electronic Publishing Specialist Group
of the British Computer Society
is pleased to invite you to a
FREE evening meeting:
18:00 - 21:00, 15th July 2008
at BCS London,
Davidson Building
5 Southampton Street
London WC2E 7HA
SPEAKERS
* Noz Urbina of Mekon Systems
* David Farbey of Dannywell Ltd
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Please arrive at 6:00 pm for a 6:30 pm start.
It is probable that sandwiches and drinks will be served,
but this has not been confirmed at the time of writing.
See bottom of this message for link to Registration page.
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"Structure and Evolution in technical publishing:
XML and DITA in practice"
*** Structure...
When publications are referred to as "unstructured",
it often sounds like an unwarranted insult: are they not
already well thought out, coherently expressed, divided
into sections?
All these may be true, and readily apparent to a human being,
yet unless the structure and semantics of documents is expressed
formally in a machine-processable language, there is a limit to
how well machines can help us in searching for & retrieving them,
assembling them, and presenting them in print or on screen.
The technical documentation community has understood this for
a longer time than any other, perhaps with the exception of
scholarly publishers. These are the communities which fostered
the use of SGML in publishing, and latterly XML.
How do organisations bring structure to their publications?
SGML and XML do not constitute a ready-made toolkit: they are
"meta-languages" that allow an enterprise to define its own
required semantic structures in the form of Document Type
Definitions or XML Schemas.
Noz Urbina of Mekon Systems, which has developed and
implemented many XML-based publishing systems for clients,
including government, military and aerospace, will explain
and illustrate with case studies what is involved in setting
up an appropriate system, and the benefits that can accrue
from taking the structured road to creating and maintaining
suites of documentation.
*** ... and Evolution
In the last nine years, the world of structured publishing has
been refreshed by a new forward-thinking initiative called DITA:
Darwin Information Typing Architecture. DITA arose from an IBM
project and is now an OASIS standard supported by a toolkit.
DITA responds to the criticism that most structured-publishing
solutions simply formalise (as a DTD or Schema) an enterprise's
existing legacy business practices, making it hard for documentation
practices to evolve. It seeks to solve the problem by encouraging
the authoring of small, structured chunks of information: topics.
These small chunks may explain a concept or describe a procedure,
and could usefully be re-used in different explanatory contexts.
DITA also provides for "maps" which gather and organise the topics
into coherent publications for print on online display. Metadata,
attached to the components, plays an important part in managing
the workflow and guiding the processes of assembly, transformation
and presentation that result in the final "publication" as it is
perceived by the user.
David Farbey, a freelance technical communicator and information
design consultant, will explain DITA and how it can deliver
considerable efficiencies and economies. He will also talk
about the impact that creating structured documentation with
DITA compliant tools has on the working methods and thinking
of writers and editors.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
Although attendance is free, BCS security and fire safety regulations
insist that all attending must be pre-registered. We have set up an
"Event Wax" online registration facility which you can find by
following this TinyURL Web link: http://tinyurl.com/4ayvjb
Additionally, we ask that if you do register and later find you are
unable to attend, PLEASE email us to release the place, as there
may be a waiting list.
Conrad Taylor ([log in to unmask])
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Conrad Taylor: Information design & electronic publishing
Chairperson, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group
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Ann Apps MBCS CITP. Research & Development, Mimas,
The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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