DITA: What You Need To know about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture  

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a hot topic among those who author, edit, deliver and manage content. But adopting a standard architecture is an important decision that requires up front research and knowledge of the pitfalls. Find out if DITA is right for your organization. Read this whitepaper to learn more (PDF).

Manning, Steve. Rockley Group, The (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>XML

Documenting Schemas  

The issue of documenting schemas—or any machine readable language—goes beyond simple additions of comments. Thereal challengeistocreateschemasthat arereadablebothdirectlybylookingat their sourcecodeandbydocumentation extraction tools.

van der Vlist, Eric. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Articles>Information Design>XML>Documentation

Dublin Core Conference Summary 2003

What is Dublin Core? And why would you need a whole conference about it? The end of September and beginning of October brought representatives from various countries around the world to a sunny and warm Seattle, Washington, host of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference.

Gonzales-Chan, Madonnalisa and Sarah Rice. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

Dublin Core Corporate Circles of Interest

The 2002 Dublin Core annual conference and workshop marked the beginning of a new effort by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to involve members of the corporate world in the evolution and application of the Dublin Core standard. The first meetings of two DCMI Circles of Interest were held on Monday, October 14, 2002, followed the next day by a panel session with several members of the Circles presenting their initial observations and conclusions to the wider conference.

Crandall, Mike. Montague Institute Review (2002). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

Edit XML Documents with Emacs and nXML

The nXML mode for GNU Emacs provides a powerful environment for creating valid XML documents.

O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML

The Electric XML Acid Test

This will be the story of my life from the time my boss came to me and said, 'Hey, maybe we could do that Knowledge Base in XML. I hear good things about that XML,' to the time that I figured out everything I needed to know and deployed a fully functional XML knowledge base to the world.

Robotti, Anne. KeyContent.org (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML

Examining XML

Buzz about the value and implications of XML has reached an all-time high, with lofty claims of its potential to transform business and society, doing everything from simple document formatting to curing the common cold. I don't recommend you empty your medicine cabinet just yet. However, do take seriously the developments surrounding XML and its associated technologies. While XML might not merit all the hyperbole, it remains useful. Knowing how to apply this simple meta-language can help you create solutions that will give you a strong competitive advantage.

Trytten, Chris. FileMaker Advisor (2004). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML

Fast Incremental Updates of XML Records

XML is often used today as a data export and exchange format. In such cases, you might deal with a feed of XML records; sometimes, if this feed, is too long, there are performance problems importing it into another system. As such, you might want to produce only an incremental feed--that is, one that only includes items that have changed. This article presents a collection of simple techniques that you can combine into a system for more digestible feeds containing only updated records.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML

Firefox 2.0 and XML

Firefox 2.0 brought several important changes in its XML support. It's currently reaching its peak in user deployment. Learn about updated XML features in Firefox 2.0, including a controversial change to the handling of RSS Web feeds.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>Web Browsers

Frequently Asked Questions about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture

DITA experts Don Day, Michael Priestley, and Gretchen Hargis address the topic architecture of DITA, tips and techniques, and general DITA questions.

Day, Don, Michael Priestley and Gretchen Hargis. IBM (2001). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Ganzheitliche Informationslogistik Unterstützt die Technische Dokumentation  

Nicht selten wird die technische Dokumentation nur nebenbei erstellt, obwohl gute Gründe für eine stärkere Beachtung dieses potenziellen Marketinginstruments sprechen: Rechtliche Bestimmungen erzwingen bestimmte Informationen (wie etwa Sicherheitshinweise) sowie die Qualität und Form, in der sie angebracht werden müssen. Fehlende oder zu spät gelieferte Dokumentation verursacht Zahlungsausfälle in Millionenhöhe. Dokumentation und Information wird zunehmend als zusätzlicher Service, also Mehrwert für den Kunden interessant. Darüber hinaus stellt der Bereich der Dokumentation die Keimzelle für technische Informationssysteme z.B. für das Wissensmanagement oder auch die Qualitätssicherung dar, da in diesen Abteilungen ohnehin bereits sehr große Mengen des technischen Know-hows im Unternehmen vorliegen. Im folgenden Beitrag lesen Sie, wie XML und .NET den Produktionsprozess positiv beeinflussen.

Freisler, Stefan. Doculine (2002). (German) Articles>Information Design>XML

Generating XML Schema Dynamically Using VB.NET 2005: Essentials

This is the first article in a series concentrating on generating XML Schema dynamically using Visual Basic 2005. The series is mainly targeted at those who are familiar with XML, XML Schema and the .NET framework.

Chaterjee, Jagadish. ASP Free (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>ASP

Get on Board the XML Train

The next century will be an XML century, make no mistake about it. All our documents, even checks, credit card slips, personal letters, recipes, technical documents, everything, will benefit from XML technologies. Students are already learning XML in schools, and big businesses are using it to publish their databases on the web. The appearance of the electronic spreadsheet ten years ago changed the way we do business. XML will change the way we write documents.

DuBay, William H. Impact Information (1999). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Get Started with XPath 2.0

XPath 2.0 is the foundation of two essential recommendations currently in the final stages of development at W3C: XSLT 2.0 and XQuery. It is a major rewrite designed to significantly increase the power and efficiency of the language. In this article, Benoît Marchal shows how the new data model enables you to easily write more sophisticated requests.

Marchal, Benoit. IBM (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Global XML  

XML alone is not enough to effectively manage your organization's global content. Explore global XML and its benefits.

Hurst, Sophie. Intercom (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>International

How to Create an RSS Feed for any HTML Page

How can you create an RSS for a specific HTML page, especially if the page-create software or web host doesn't provide an automated method. This article discusses how to use a screen scraper to quickly and easily create a RSS feed for any HTML page.

Sapir, Rick. KeyContent.org (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

Implementing Information Architecture Using XML: A Business-Driven Approach

A few of aspects that are easy to miss in the excitement of trying to implement an XML-based information architecture in an organization.

Pant, Asit H. and Aoyon Choudhary. Indus (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML

Implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol

Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column implements the Atom Publishing Protocol as a Python web service using WSGI.

Gregorio, Joe. XML.com (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>RSS

Review: Information Architecture With XML: A Management Strategy

Despite the plethora of books positioning Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the next software programming language for IT gurus to master, the XML specification is not a programming language. Instead, it is a set of strategically important data standards that, when implemented from a tactical point of view, can provide organizations with value unsurpassed by many of the technologies that have come before it.

Abel, Scott. STC Hoosier (2003). Articles>Reviews>Information Design>XML

Information Models and XML  

The defining feature of XML is the ability to specify your own tags. Learn about what to look for in an XML information model and what a technical communicator can contribute to an XML documentation team.

Baril, France. Intercom (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML

Integrating Partner Information Using XML and XSL  

BMC Software Inc., a company that writes utility tools for database administrators, wanted to reuse the error messages from partner database companies. Having learned that two of these database companies already used single-source files for their error messages, BMC Software integrated the information about the error messages from the database companies. We accomplished our goal by negotiating with our partner companies for the source files of the error message information. This session discusses how we took those source files and modified them to create simple XML files, then transformed them into HTML using XSL transforms within a product.

Gentle, Anne. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Introducing XML Internationalization

One key benefit of XML is the fact that it was designed for international use. But do you really understand the concepts of internationalization and localization? This article explains what they are, how they work, and why you want to use them.

Silberman, Hernan. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>International

Introduction to DITA References

DITA is quickly becoming the dominant XML schema for topic-oriented authoring. DITA is a highly practical way of moving to XML authoring in general and granular content reuse in particular. DITA distinguishes itself from predecessor standards by explicitly rejecting the book paradigm in favour of a topic-oriented model.

Prescod, Paul. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

An Introduction to Extensible Stylesheet Language  

Introduces the three technologies that comprise the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) family of specifications as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Hodge, Drew W. Intercom (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Introduction to OMG's Unified Modeling Language (UML)

Large enterprise applications - the ones that execute core business applications, and keep a company going - must be more than just a bunch of code modules. They must be structured in a way that enables scalability, security, and robust execution under stressful conditions, and their structure - frequently referred to as their architecture - must be defined clearly enough that maintenance programmers can (quickly!) find and fix a bug that shows up long after the original authors have moved on to other projects. That is, these programs must be designed to work perfectly in many areas, and business functionality is not the only one (although it certainly is the essential core). Of course a well-designed architecture benefits any program, and not just the largest ones as we've singled out here. We mentioned large applications first because structure is a way of dealing with complexity, so the benefits of structure (and of modeling and design, as we'll demonstrate) compound as application size grows large. Another benefit of structure is that it enables code reuse: Design time is the easiest time to structure an application as a collection of self-contained modules or components. Eventually, enterprises build up a library of models of components, each one representing an implementation stored in a library of code modules. When another application needs the same functionality, the designer can quickly import its module from the library. At coding time, the developer can just as quickly import the code module into the application.

UML Resource Page (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>UML