Flatirons Solutions to Speak About DITA at Worldwide XML Conference

BOULDER, Colo. — Flatirons Solutions has accepted an invitation to participate in XML 2005, the leading worldwide XML conference, November 14-18, 2005, in Atlanta, GA. Flatirons will play a prominent role in one of the hottest topics in the publishing industry - DITA.

"We are pleased to again be invited to speak at one of the premier XML conferences in the world," said John Pritchard, CEO of Flatirons Solutions. "We pride ourselves on the fact that we not only understand and track the emergence of new technologies and standards, such as DITA, but more importantly, we actually have hands-on experience implementing them."

Eric Severson, CTO of Flatirons Solutions, said, "DITA is an exciting area of XML publishing. Like any new standard, it's critical to gain experience exercising it in production situations." Flatirons' XML 2005 presentations are based on solutions they have provided to clients. According to Severson, "We already have developed a great deal of experience and best practices surrounding DITA".

Flatirons will present "DITA Case Study: The Joseph Smith Papers Project". Brigham Young University, in cooperation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and assisted by Flatirons Solutions, is in the midst of an ambitious project to XML-encode all of the historical papers of LDS founder Joseph Smith. Starting with Joseph Smith's journals, the encoded XML is being used to produce both high-quality printed books, and to build a sophisticated online repository for scholarly research. Even though DITA was designed for technical documentation, it was selected for this project because of its ability to create a flexible set of information objects that can be re-purposed across many potential uses and contexts. For example, a daily entry in one of Joseph Smith's journals, together with scholarly annotations, can be treated as a set of specialized DITA topics. This presentation illustrates how the content was encoded in a TEI specialization of DITA, including an analysis of the applicability and limitations of DITA specialization techniques. It also shows how this XML fit into the complex workflow associated with scholarly encoding efforts.

Flatirons will also present, "Designing DocBook in a DITA-Compatible Fashion".