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XML Publishing, DITA Publishing, Technical Publishing, Commercial Publishing, XML Content Management, and the Promise of Single Sourcing

In the days when print publishing was the only option, businesses had no choice but to mass-distribute information and hope it met the needs of their clients, vendors and partners. XML is a mature, robust, widely adopted standards-based technology that enables businesses to effectively manage content, create an efficient transport mechanism for collaboration and to maximize its value by combining it with data. Today, with Web-based technology, web publishing, and new XML standards like DITA, we have other choices.

DITA publishing is the most significant development in the technical publishing world today. As the DITA standard takes hold, it is also seeing adoption in the realm of commercial publishing. With its topic-based approach to authoring, DITA frees us from the need to think in terms of “books”, and lets us focus on the underlying information. XML Content Management and, more specifically, DITA authoring makes the promise of "publication agnostic" content more realizable than ever before. With DITA's modular, reusable information elements, businesses can not only publish across different formats and media – but also flexibly recombine information for different audience needs.

Initial DITA implementations have focused primarily on publishing to pre-defined PDF, HTML and Help formats – that is, on static publishing. But the real promise of DITA lies in supporting dynamic, personalized content delivery (known as Single Source Publishing).

Flatirons Solutions' SourceOnce™ methodology is carefully designed to eliminate redundancy and inaccuracy (as well as significantly reduce effort) by establishing one logical source of content. On an enterprise level, this translates to an enterprise repository – one place where critical business information is stored, utilized, and managed. Using XML-based technologies with enterprise content management implementations, our solutions provide one source for content and, more important, the ability to:

• Automatically re-purpose content to any format and style.
• Dynamically assemble documents based on business rules.
• Re-use content to enable changes to be made in one place and automatically update all affected documents.

At Flatirons Solutions we've been testing the boundaries of DITA's extensibility, taking DITA publishing/authoring out of its comfort zone and thereby creating some interesting proof points for its flexibility. Four specific applications illustrate this:

• User Personalized Documentation – Designed to support a variety of enterprise content libraries out of a single set of specializations, this application involved the use of 15 conditional processing attributes to drive dynamic production of personalized documents. An initial DocBook-based prototype was later re-designed for DITA.
• Scholarly Research Database – This solution involved marrying DITA with the venerable Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a nearly 20 year old scholarly markup standard originally written in SGML. DITA was used to split the historical material into searchable topics; TEI provided the rigorous scholarly markup and annotations.
• Dynamic Web Publishing – Designed for a large brokerage and business services firm, this application combines a single-source DITA-based authoring environment with an optimized dynamic processing pipeline that produces highly-personalized Web pages.
• Commercial Publishing – We are currently exploring the use of DITA authoring and publishing for encyclopedia, journal, and textbook publishing, for clients who have traditionally focused on print, but who are now also moving to increasingly sophisticated electronic products.

The emergence of DITA publishing represents an important evolution in the growing field XML publishing, and in content single sourcing (reusing modular content across publications and content channels). Flatirons Solutions has the experience to help its clients effectively leverage these new standards and technologies, and to realize the productivity gains that they can bring to publishing teams.