DITApedia proposal

["Su-Laine Yeo" <su-laine.yeo@xmetal.com>]

Hi everyone,

Here are more details about the "DITApedia" idea we discussed this
morning. I'd love to hear what the rest of you think.

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Rationale

The current body of knowledge for DITA is fragmented across many
different places:
- Very general "overview" articles in magazines and Wikipedia
- Articles and presentations written by DITA evangelists, consultants,
tool vendors, and experienced users
- Archives of the Yahoo DITA user group 
- Official DITA Language Reference and Architectural Specification
- Introduction to DITA book by Comtech
- DITA Open Toolkit User Guide 
- Open Toolkit documentation

Answering a question such as "Can I use DITA if I need to deliver
content in Japanese?" may require digging through many different
sources. We often hear from writers that core DITA documentation such as
the Language Reference needs more examples or richer descriptions. 

Members of the TC would also like to make it easier for the community to
comment on DITA specifications. 

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Proposal: a Wikpedia-type site devoted to DITA

- It aims to be a compendium of knowledge about DITA and the Open
Toolkit. The wiki at dita.xml.org was originally intended to be this,
but hasn't kicked into gear.
- It would be complementary to most of the current content in
dita.xml.org. The DITApedia wiki would focus on objective reference-type
information, whereas the other areas on dita.xml.org are more
appropriate for expression of points of view (thought leadership), and
copyrighted content. (I think many of the articles in
http://dita.xml.org/knowledge-base could, with permission, perhaps be
moved to the DITApedia wiki. For example, this one:
http://dita.xml.org/arch-maps )
- We would seed the wiki with a dump of the Langref, ArchSpec, and free
OT documentation. Permission will need to be negotiated for each of
these. One goal is to produce more usable and complete, but unofficial,
versions of the descriptions of the core DITA documentation set,
including the Language Reference and Architectural Specification. (We
have wanted to import core documents into a wiki environment for some
time, but don't yet know technically how to do it. One key action item
is therefore to find or develop a DITA-to-wikitext or HTML-to-wikitext
conversion method.)

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Prototype

I've created a simple DITApedia prototype here:
http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/DITApedia. I've fleshed out a couple of
areas to demonstrate some capabilities:
- To answer the question, "Can I use DITA if I need to deliver content
in Japanese?" you would click "Supported languages" and then "Japanese
language." The "Japanese language" page should tell you about all the
gotchas for working with Japanese content.
- The official description of the <image> element would be given in a
page like this: http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Image_element . 


Su-Laine


-----Original Message-----
From: Carol Geyer [mailto:carol.geyer@oasis-open.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 12:17 PM
To: 'DITA Editorial Board'
Subject: [dita-fa-edboard] Minutes: 14 June 2007 DITA XML.org Editorial
Board Call

Attending: Sue-Laine (chair), Michael, Deb, Carol

1. Amber's <soapbox> article
Attendees had not read Amber's latest draft, so this item was tabled for
further Board discussion via email.

2. Sample documents
Sue-Laine discussed her idea for enabling people to post documents
written in
DITA as examples for testing. The purpose would be to provide examples
that
people could review, samples that could be run through the toolkit, ways
to
test the toolkit. While we may want to offer a more specific user
interface at
some point, the Board decided to test the concept by creating a new
resource
type in the RESOURCES directory.

AI: Carol to create new resource type.
Board: To post sample documents and provide suggestions for customizing
the UI.

3. Recent posts
Michael suggested we change "Recent blog" headlines in right nav to
"Recent
posts" so that new entries throughout the site receive visibility.

AI: Carol to work with IT to change right nav to display the five most
recent
posts of any kind. 

4. DITA-pedia
Sue-Laine discussed her idea to incorporate true wiki technology to
create a
DITA-pedia site on the order of wikipedia. Others agreed that this would
enhance our current Knowledge base and Wiki portions of the site (which
have
been less successful than the Today section). 

We identified several issues:
- How do we get the seed content? 
- Which wiki do we use--mediawiki, perhaps something new from Drupal,
something
else?
- Integration with the existing site is critical.
- We'll need to clearly distinguish comments from the formal
specification (and
not confuse the two); possibly locking down content.
- If we ask people to comment on the spec, we need to address IPR
concerns.

AI: Sue-Laine to investigate an html-to-wiki text converter.
AI: Sue-Laine to develop technical requirements for the wiki software
itself
that we can provide to OASIS IT.
AI: Carol to work with Mary and Robin on IPR issues around submitting
comments.




Next call:
12 July 2007
2:00 pm EST
+1 (605) 990-0700, access code: 562542*


_________________________________
Carol Geyer
Director of Communications
OASIS
+1.978.667.5115 x209 


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