[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]
Subject: Re: [dita] Re: Comparison between DITA and S1000D
Hi, Scott, Eliot, John, and Indi:
Indi, I'm copying you directly with these comments because I know you have wrestled with retrofitting existing vocabularies and might have some experience to share.
I'd note that retrofitting is likely to have limits and costs.
You could certainly treat the entire existing S1000D element set as a single base module (equivalent to the DITA topic module). That would give you the ability to derive new elements from the existing S1000D elements and to generalize from these specialized elements back to the existing S1000D elements.
As I read S1000D, there's an intent for modularity. A more ambitious retrofitting effort would be to attempt to refactor the existing S1000D element set into type modules and, possibly, define specialization relationships between the existing S1000D elements. Because a specialized element has to be a structural subset of the base element (including attributes), whether that's possible depends entirely on the existing element definitions. Whether this refactoring can support content with topic granularity, again, depends entirely on the definition of existing model. That is, merely adding class attributes can't introduce consistency between semantically related elements nor topic granularity into models with continuous discourse.
Even if you could retrofit an existing vocabulary with a topic architecture, however, you'd lose reuse and interoperability with the standard DITA types. As new types are added to the DITA type hierarchy, those types would become available to DITA adopters but not to the retrofitted S1000D users. Similarly, DITA adopters could exchange content through DITA generalization, but S1000D users would have to use a custom transform that might have areas with poor interchange. As is well established in Object Oriented systems, a common type hierarchy with a single base has tremendous value for interoperability.
Thus, from a technical perspective, the best solution would be to rework the S1000D elements as needed to graft S1000D type modules onto the DITA type hierarchy. The result would support content that's completely DITA interoperable but looks a lot like S1000D documents and provide a relatively good transform target (because of similar semantics and structure). That approach would have significant long-term benefits. Before the S1000D community could embrace that approach, someone would have prototype the S1000D modules to demonstrate the possibilities.
More generally, the DITA TC should recommend as a preferred approach that human-readable topic content be modelled on a single type hierarchy. Of course, other kinds of content (for instance, invoice data) would be a distinct type hierarchy.
Thanks,
Erik Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com
Eliot Kimber <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>
08/23/2004 02:42 PM
|
|
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]