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Subject: RE: [dita] C/T/R Not Universal (was problem with packaging of glossaries)
Thank you for the publishing world specialization examples. You ones you mention -- article, sub-section, and so on -- are, as you say, container specializations rather than what I would call semantic specializations, since they are not intended to model or constrain the type of subject matter they contain. This is entirely understandable in the publishing realm, which must find commonalities not in subject matter, which changes very frequently, but in how that subject matter is packaged: as articles, as collections of articles, as sidebars, as bylines, and so on. In the BusDocs SC, we've been focusing on semantic specializations, since we believe these are the ones of most immediate value to business users, who are looking for commonalities in subject matter: value propositions, functional specifications, policies, and so on. As such, the semantics of the existing concept, task, and reference topic types can be applied more or less easily to business content. Tim -----Original Message----- From: ekimber [mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com] Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 12:14 PM To: dita Cc: 'Bruce Nevin (bnevin)'; 'Michael Boses'; tgrantham@timgrantham.com; 'Michael Priestley'; 'JoAnn Hackos'; rockley@rockley.com Subject: Re: [dita] C/T/R Not Universal (was problem with packaging of glossaries) On 8/24/09 10:31 AM, "Tim Grantham" <tgrantham@timgrantham.com> wrote: > You write: > >> Concept, task and reference are not "universal". There are many uses >> of > DITA for which they >> are completely irrelevant. > > Some examples, please? In traditional publishing content, such as trade books or novels or magazines, the distinction between "concept" and other stuff is not one that is generally recognized or useful. In addition, the concept topic type is too constrained to use as a base for new specializations that are specific to publishing applications. In particular, the requirement in concept that sections cannot be followed by non-sections is too restrictive for many publishing applications, where potentially non-sensical structures must be accommodated. In short, for Publishers, what is needed is a very generic container for content that can be augmented with more or less sophisticated metadata, domains, and used in more-or-less specialized map structures. These containers can of course serve as the base for more-constrained specialized topic types as appropriate. In this context, the notion that some content is "conceptual" where other content is task or reference is not a useful notion and there's no point in making information architects make the distinction artificially. Of course, within the publishing context there is information that is strictly reference (e.g., nature guides) and information that is purely task (e.g., training and operation publications) but most publications don't make the distinction that clearly and don't need to. For a nature guide application I would combine the generic topic types listed below with specializations of reference developed for a specific reference publication or type of reference info (e.g., a bird guide reference entry, a city guide reference entry, etc.). In addition, Publishing applications have to accommodate a much greater degree of arbitrary structures where even the constraint imposed by concept is inappropriate. So using concept as a base for all topic types that are clearly not task or reference just doesn't help in this context. In the DITA for Publishers project, based on work I've done with a number of publishers and different document types represented using DITA-based markup, including test prep manuals, financial standards, government-published reports, trade books, and magazines of various sorts, I've developed these basic topic types, specialized from topic. In each case, the body content of these topic types is the same: completely generic and unconstrained (that is, they all re-use unspecialized topic/body as their body element). The topic types are: article: An article in a serial publication chapter: A chapter in a book-type publication part: A part in a book-type publication sidebar: An out-of-line titled component subsection: A nestable subdivision within a higher-level division (e.g., within a chapter, article, sidebar, etc. Combined with the more generic and flexible pubmap domain and unspecialized topics as a fallback, these topic types enable representation of essentially any publication. You can see examples of this in the samples areas of both the DITA4Publishers project and the DITA2InDesign project. Cheers, Eliot ---- Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc. email: ekimber@reallysi.com <mailto:ekimber@reallysi.com> office: 610.631.6770 | cell: 512.554.9368 2570 Boulevard of the Generals | Suite 213 | Audubon, PA 19403 www.reallysi.com <http://www.reallysi.com> | http://blog.reallysi.com <http://blog.reallysi.com> | www.rsuitecms.com <http://www.rsuitecms.com>
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