DITA round-up

Apparently, lots of people are creating specializations. It's not so surprising that companies are creating their own specializations, which allows them to use DITA in a way that better fits their needs.

What was surprising was seeing how a large number of organizations and other groups are working together to create specializations that are available for others to use. For example, there are specializations being developed for the manufacturing industry, for the pharmaceutical industry, and for learning and training.

The learning and training specialization gives me hope that information topics developed by IDD could be reused by instructional designers.

Link round-up

I checked out the links that Michael Priestley mentioned. They're a great source for more information about DITA.

• OASIS DITA Technical Committee - This is where the work behind DITA as an open standard is happening. If you're new to DITA, check out their DITA FAQ. You can find out what's happening with the DITA standard, and with the subcommittees for specializations that might become standards. And, of course, more links.
• DITA Open Toolkit - This toolkit is a free open source implementation of DITA in Java. I've heard that it's not trivial to implement, so this is probably only for those serious about trying DITA without a commercial product.
• DITA online community - This community is hosted by OASIS. It lists news and events, includes a wiki, and even tutorials. It also includes blogs about DITA.
  
• DITA Users Yahoo group - If you have questions about using DITA, this is a place to pose questions, and possibly get answers.
  
• DITA Users.org - This is a well-organized one-stop site for resources, tools, tutorials, and examples. Members get file storage space, access to the web-based XML editor DITA Storm, and other services.
  

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