Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
October/November 2006
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter October/November 2006 |
The October meeting is on Wednesday, October 18, 2006, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
DITA standardizes some very sophisticated content reuse techniques. Yas Etessam will describe the business benefits of reuse, and explain how to implement DITA’s three methods of reusing content. She will illustrate with examples and demonstrations.
The first of DITA's content reuse mechanisms is the map. At the highest level, you create DITA deliverables by composing maps of reusable topics. Maps allow you to declare relationships between topics, and encourage authors to think in a topic-oriented way. A DITA map contains no content of its own: it is purely about reuse. Secondly, DITA's content references provide a way for topics and maps to embed other content; for example, different topics can share common paragraphs, lists, and tables. Finally, DITA's filtering enables you to make content conditional, adapting it to its context.
DITA's content reuse capabilities are very powerful and deeply integrated into the overall DITA architecture.
Yas Etessam is a content lifecycle consultant at XMetaL specializing in XML-based content solutions.
Yas has an extensive background in XML, SGML and their related technologies. She is an active participant in the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) technical committee. Her domain expertise includes the application of XML in government, intellectual property and knowledge base applications.Since 2000, Yas has worked with enterprise clients including Microsoft, HP, Cisco and WIPO to develop XMetaL authoring solutions. Prior to Blast, Yas worked on the System Development team at Statistics Canada maintaining critical monthly processes and supporting aggregation and publishing of economic and environmental data.
Yas holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from McGill University and has been certified as an IBM XML developer.