Members Approve DITA 1.3 as OASIS Standard for Authoring and Publishing
Adobe, Boeing, Cisco, Comtech, Dell, Huawei, IBM, Intel, ISIS Papyrus, IXIASOFT, Microsoft, Oracle, PTC, SAP, SDL, TELUS, US DoD, and Others Advance Open Standard for Content Reuse and Multi-Channel Delivery
1 February 2016 – The OASIS open standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) version 1.3 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. DITA defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, and publishing information in numerous formats, including print, Web-based, mobile, and electronic publications. DITA is widely used for professionally-published books and magazines, technical documentation, online help, training and course development, marketing materials, and medical information because of its modular, topic-based approach and its ability to support content reuse.
This release of DITA comes in three parts, optimized for different audiences:
- Base Edition is designed for application developers and users who need only the most fundamental pieces of the DITA framework.
- Technical Content Edition includes specializations usually used by technical communicators.
- All Inclusive Edition is designed for implementers who want all OASIS-approved specializations, as well as users who develop learning and training materials.
“The unique feature of the DITA standard is specialization,” said Kristen James Eberlein, chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. “DITA enables practitioners to create new elements from existing ones in order to increase semantic precision. For example, a section element can be specialized to represent more specific types of sections such as ‘Introduction’, ‘Main point’, and ‘Conclusion’; this enables more precise semantic searching and better guidance for authors.”
“Done correctly,” Eberlein continued, “output processors will always understand the specialization hierarchy–a section is always a section, after all–and be able to apply general processing transformations. Together the re-use and interoperation possibilities of DITA allow great cost sharing and cost reductions.”
DITA 1.3 is ready for implementation. Prior to its approval, 14 Statements of Use for DITA 1.3 were provided by Comtech Services, IXIASOFT, PTC, and 11 other organizations and open source initiatives, including the DITA Open Toolkit.
Participation in the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and the DITA Adoption Committee is open to all companies, non-profit groups, governments, academic institutions, and individuals. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committees’ work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mailing list for public comment.
Support for DITA 1.3
Adobe
“Adobe is delighted to provide continued support to the DITA standard which has leveraged the power of single-sourcing, content reuse and specialization over the years. Adobe also welcomes the new features, introduced in DITA 1.3, such as troubleshooting topic type, keyscopes, branch filtering, MathML domain, XML mention domain and many other valuable additions. Adobe has successfully used the DITA 1.3 Candidate OASIS Standard 01 Part 3 (All Inclusive Edition) and its authoring and publishing software, Adobe FrameMaker (2015 release), is a fully-aware DITA processor which interoperates with multiple independent implementations.”
— Pawan Goyal, Sr. Director and General Manager (Print, Scan, TechComm Business) Adobe
Cisco
“Cisco congratulates the DITA TC on another successful release of the DITA standard. Cisco uses DITA for its technical documentation because it enables content reuse, standardization, and output flexibility. We are eagerly awaiting the 1.3 release, especially the new troubleshooting template. This template allows us to create topics that contain both reference information and task steps in a single, unified chunk. It will greatly improve our ability to present troubleshooting information in a customer-friendly format.”
— Jen Allen, Information Architect and Jane Credland, Project Manager, Cisco Systems
Comtech
“Comtech Services, Inc. is very pleased by the strong support of the OASIS community for the DITA 1.3 specification. We believe that DITA 1.3 moves the capability of the DITA standard ahead significantly in support of the international information-development community. We have witnessed an ever-increasing group of industries and technologies adopting the DITA standard.”
–JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD, President, Comtech
IBM
“DITA continues to be a key part of IBM’s sourcing strategy for post-sales technical content. IBM is already using one new DITA 1.3 feature, branch filtering, to manage multiple publishing targets in complex reuse scenarios. The DITA 1.3 specification document itself represents a significant improvement over the 1.2 version. Hundreds of pages have been overhauled to reduce redundancy and clutter, with examples added to greatly improve clarity for adopters.”
–Eileen Jones, Director, Enterprise Content & eSupport Services, and IBM Client Content Quality Executive
ISIS Papyrus
“As an OASIS Sponsor, ISIS Papyrus appreciates the DITA standard to ensure an XML archi-tecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing information. DITA is a step forward for better interoperability when publishing information in print and on the Web. Following the DITA data model helps to generate popular output formats (HTML, PDF, Java and HTML Help, etc.) from vendor and software version-independent content.”
–Max J. Pucher, co-founder/CTO, ISIS Papyrus Software
IXIASOFT
“As active members of OASIS, we are excited to play a part in the evolving DITA standard. Talking to our customers we know that there are many features of DITA 1.3 they are interested in and we are already in the process of adapting our product, the IXIASOFT DITA CMS, to ensure that our users can benefit from the new DITA standard as soon as possible.”
— Eric Bergeron, CEO, IXIASOFT
PTC
“PTC has actively supported and endorsed the DITA standard since its first release. We have seen a large number of customers embrace and realize the value of the DITA standard through content reuse and flexibility. PTC is excited to continue promoting DITA 1.3 for cus-tomers utilizing our Service and Parts Information Solution.”
–Pushpinder Toor, Director, SLM Solution Management, PTC
Oracle
“Oracle welcomes the continued development of the DITA specification. As an early adopter, Oracle invested heavily in DITA with both specialized and non-specialized markup. Now pervasive throughout Oracle, DITA is truly an evolving information development ecosystem. A perfect fit for Oracle’s ever-growing needs, DITA 1.3 promises enhanced accessibility, plus welcome improvements for large, interrelated publications with DITA features like scoped keys and cross–deliverable linking.”
–Jennifer Briscoe, VP, Product Development, Oracle
SDL
“SDL, a leader in global content management and language software and services, is pleased to see that DITA 1.3 is about to be approved as a standard. SDL has always pioneered the use of DITA in its structured content management solution, SDL Knowledge Center, to store, organize and manage all modular content in any language. The use of DITA allows our customers to easily reuse, share, filter and deliver content to all appropriate channels.”
–Dennis van der Veeke, CTO, SDL
About OASIS:
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) drives the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for the global information society. A nonprofit consortium, OASIS advances standards for content technologies, IoT, security, cloud computing, emergency management, e-commerce, e-government, and other areas. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of technology. The consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries.
Press contact: Carol Geyer, OASIS Senior Director, carol.geyer@oasis-open.org