Announcing the DITA2Wiki open-source project

September 22nd, 2008 Lisa Dyer Posted in User Assistance | 7 Comments »

If your vision is to tap the knowledge of your online user community and weave that knowledge into your content, but you lack the tools or resources to build such as system, read this.

Announcing the DITA2Wiki open-source project

The DITA2wiki project:

• Provides tools and best practices for integrating DITA content with a wiki environment
• Enables the user community to extend DITA2wiki distributions with features such as full round-tripping (from DITA to wiki to DITA) and support for any open-source or commercial wiki

Go to SourceForge.net to learn more about DITA2Wiki and to download the project distributions.

(What is DITA? In brief, the DITA OASIS Standard it is a widely adopted XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing information. To learn more, visit DITA XML.org.)

Why did we launch this project?

The DITA2Wiki project was launched by Lombardi Software in recognition of the keen interest within the DITA community to incorporate wikis into their information-development processes and outputs. Our first donation to the project, the DITA2Confluence tool, enables users to import DITA content to the Confluence enterprise wiki. DITA2Confluence provides robust support for conref and ditaval, the DITA content reuse constructs.

Lombardi Software incorporated wikis into their information exchange processes in early 2005, and soon began developing a solution for enabling community contributions to their product documentation. In early 2007, “Lombardi Wikis” was launched.

The Lombardi Wiki system hosts three types of content:

• Product documentation, which is maintained in DITA XML and published to the wiki per on-demand and release updates (preserving community contributions)
• Community-generated articles and sample product implementations which complement the product documentation
• Internal-only content for project management and knowledge exchange

An integrated search feature enables users to find information from all content spaces based on their permissions. This slideshare presentation talks about the value proposition, processes, and implementation in more detail.

The system has enjoyed steadily growing adoption, and has become an integral part of helping customers and Lombardi team members find the information they need in their day-to-day jobs. For the Lombardi Information Development team, who developed the system, it is mission-critical in helping the team gauge what information users need and how to effectively address those needs.

Now, the team can deliver immediate updates in response to the latest product development and user contributions, and, from a single standard source, deliver a complex set of other outputs for online and offline consumption. Many wiki vendors will tell you that their systems enable you to produce production-quality documentation outputs, but the Lombardi experience shows clearly that the real-world needs are only superficially supported by wikis without engaging in major customizations. And of course, the wikis only serve you as long as you’re online.

The DITA2Confluence tool was put to the test through an Early Adopter program, involving a group of small-to-midsized innovative companies with different use cases. While the DITA2Confluence tool is by no means complete in scope – everyone implements the DITA content model differently – a large subset of the DITA DTDs is supported by the publishing process to give you a fast track to wikifying your DITA content.

Stay tuned for more updates on the DITA2Wiki project as more users join the project.