Presented by Joe Gelb, Suite Solutions, www.suite-sol.com Dynamic XML publishing makes your content available anywhere, anytime, on any device, in the right format and in any language quickly and effectively. That's a great start, but your customers expect more. Your corporate sponsors do, too! To maximize your investment in structured content and DITA XML, you need to facilitate quick and easy access to relevant information, enable and encourage audience participation, and build a customer-centered community of content around your products. You need a mobile-friendly social knowledgebase framework that is available whenever, wherever, and however your customers want. During this presentation, you will learn how to use DITA to build and maintain a subjectscheme model for metadata and classification, enabling quick, goal-oriented, and contextually useful access to documentation, how-to articles, safety information, videos, data sheets, support, and marketing material. You will also see examples of how a mobile-friendly social knowledge platform with native support for DITA enables community collaboration, allows customers to search, filter and manage relevant information quickly, and dynamically publish chosen content to PDF and ePub formats on-demand. Presented with the easyDITA Ask the Expert Series: Original airdate 8/29/2012

1. Dynamic Content Meets Social
Engagement
Joe Gelb, Suite Solutions

2. Who is this guy?
Joe Gelb
• Founder and President of Suite Solutions
Suite Solutions
• Industry Leading Consultant, Systems Integrator, Application Developer
• Specialists in DITA and XML Authoring/Publishing Solutions
• Focus on Enterprise Intelligent Content
• Cross-Industry Expertise
• High Technology
• Aerospace & Defense
• Healthcare
• Discrete Manufacturing
• Blue Chip Customer Base
• Hundreds of Person Years of Experience on Staff

3. Main Topics
• What is Dynamic Publishing?
• What is Contextual Relevance and why is it so important?
• How can Social Engagement help?
• How can the DITA Classification and Subject Scheme enable context?
• How can a Social Knowledgebase platform enable you to provide
Dynamic Enterprise Intelligent Content?

4. What is Dynamic Publishing?
• Provides people with easy access to contextually relevant information,
enabling them to be effective
• Harnesses applicable business rules
• Leverages automation to assemble a variety of different content types on
demand according to each individual’s requests
• Quickly renders, packages and delivers the personalized product to the
device, format and language of choice

5. Typical DITA XML Implementation
DITA XML AuthoringLegacy Conversion
- Tech Docs
and Migration
- How-to Articles
- Training
- Service Bulletins
XML
SME Review
CCMS
Component Content
Management System
Automated Publishing Dynamic Docs
- DITA Open Toolkit - SuiteShare
- DITA Accelerator - Knowledge Portal
- Support Portal
Web Help Mobile
Help Manuals On-demand

6. DITA XML Implementation with Integration with
Enterprise Systems
XML Authoring Parts and Wiring
- Tech Docs Legacy Conversion
and Migration
- How-to Articles
- Training
- Service Bulletins
XML PLM
ERP / CRM / PLM * ECOs
* Drawings
Integration * Eng. Docs
SME Review Module * BOM ERP
* Feedback
CMS
Content Management
CRM
System
Automated Publishing Dynamic Docs
- DITA Open Toolkit - SuiteShare
- DITA Accelerator - Knowledge Portal
- Support Portal
Web Help Mobile
Help Manuals On-demand

7. What is Contextual Relevance?
What they need, when they need it.
For us to enable our readers to be effective, we care about:
• Who is the reader (i.e. audience profile)
• Type of user: end user, technician, field service engineer, solution
engineer, support professional, sales or marketing person
• Security profile
• Proficiency level, training received and accredited
• What equipment are they operating? version? configuration?
• What are they trying to accomplish? What is their goal?
• Install? Configure? Troubleshoot?
• Make a purchasing decision?
• Other parameters:
• Physical location, environmental conditions
• What device are they viewing the information on?

8. The challenge for the information
consumer
Quick access to useful information: Examples
• I’m a service engineer.
How do I install
the 2400S Valve
with ProLink protocol
using an AMS Device Manager controller
version 10.5?

9. The challenge for the information
consumer
Quick access to useful information: Examples
• I’m a support professional at a call center.
How do I troubleshoot
a Samsung Galaxy S2 smart phone that
fails to synchronize on a Dell laptop
running Windows7 Home Edition?
• I don’t know what I am. But I just want to…
Update maps
on my Garmin Nuvi 2350 GPS
using bluetooth
while I’m on my trip to Europe

10. Business Rules
What information do we provide? How? When?
• Who gets access to what information
• Internal readers vs. customers vs. publically available
• Level of service the customer has purchased
• Security profile
• Level of training and proficiency
• Geographical location
• How customers are using our products
• What solutions our company provides, what products and services can be
offered to provide the right solution
• Protocols, operating systems, platforms our products support
• Safety and environmental considerations

11. Our challenge as information developers
Employ effective methods and tools for authoring, managing and publishing
our content
• Structured and modular topic-based content is a great start
• CCMS with automated publishing and style sheets
We still need effective ways to “mark-up” our content
• Categorize the content: for what is it applicable? For whom? When?
• Provide links to other relevant information
• Leveraging other experts in and out of our organization
But: we can’t spend all our time “tagging up” the content.
Or it just won’t get done.

12. Approaches to categorizing content
Metadata
Applying metadata to our content: topics and maps
Subject classification
Build a knowledge model of our domain – the subject matter which our
content comes to express – and apply it to our content
How about using conditional attributes?
Not an effective approach:
• Based on model of “excluding” irrelevant content on any level
• Used for filtering, not retrieval
• Filtering operation is generally done during publishing
• Setting filter criteria would be much more complex if conditional attributes
were loaded with categorization information

13. What is metadata?
Source: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/cnews/article.php/3878261/Tech-Comics-Whats-Metadata.htm

14. What is metadata?
Metadata is “data about data”
It describes the nature of a publication or topic:
What is this information applicable or effective for, when and for who
Examples:
• audience
• category
• keywords
• product info
• versions
• product name, brand, component, feature, platform, series
• othermeta
• data
Can specialize new elements

15. What is metadata?
OK, but:
• How can relate this to the Device controllers? And the version? And the
vertical solutions where it can be used?
• What happens when my device gets supported by a new controller?

16. What’s wrong with metadata?
Metadata can categorize my content, but:
• There are a limited number of metadata elements
Yes, we can specialize, but it can be unwieldy to change DTDs to
correspond with a growing, robust information model
• Difficult to relate the content to other contexts
• Even so, if the content becomes related to new contexts, it would require
constant updating of each topic
• We may not know all the contexts where my content will be used
• Perhaps not all of the content is in DITA
• Best practice: maintain the categorizations and relationships outside the
content
Introducing: DITA classification and subject scheme
But first, some background….

17. What is Information Architecture for
Content?
• Method for organizing content resources – text, media – into an
overarching knowledge model
• The knowledge model is created and maintained separate from the actual
content – like creating a global index
• “Allows us to provide access to the information based on the model of the
knowledge it contains”
Steven Newcomb
• First level: Organization of content by hierarchy and relationships
• Next level: Organization of subjects, and relating content to those
subjects
Subject: thing, entity, idea or shared understanding of something

18. What is the DITA classification and
subject scheme?
Subject Scheme
• Used to define sets of controlled values for classifying content
• Subjects are defined in a subject scheme map
• Subjects are organized in a hierarchy (taxonomy)
• Relationships between subjects are defined using relationship tables
• The subject set can evolve to adapt to new situations and contexts
Classification
• Used to identify subjects in the content based on the subjects defined in
the subject scheme map
• Topics are classified in maps, not in the topics themselves

19. Subject Classification Scheme
“Subject Classification with DITA and SKOS,” Hennum, Anderson and Bird, October 2005

20. What is the DITA classification and
subject scheme?
Subject schemes can be modular and distributed:
• Business units can develop, maintain and utilize parts of the taxonomy that
are relevant to them
• SMEs can classify the content, not only the content developers
• Allows you to classify content that you do not control
Can be drawn from other enterprise systems and databases:
• Corporate ECM and taxonomies
• CRM – customer relationship information
• PDM / PLM – engineering data
• Parts catalogs and ordering systems

21. Subject scheme maps
subjectScheme map
• Specialized DITA map
• Defines a collection of subjects rather than topics
• Comprised of nested subjectdef elements
• Can specify the type of hierarchical relationship
• hasInstance
• hasKind
• hasPart
• hasRelated
• hasNarrower

22. subjectScheme Example

23. Subject Relationships
subjectRelTable: relationship table
• Establish relationships between subjects
• Examples:
• User-type and Product
• Product component and Function
• For troubleshooting and support:
• Symptom and Component

24. Subject Relationships Example
Header

25. Subject Relationships Example
Relations

26. Classify Topics by Subject
subjectRef
• Identifies subjects that classify the topic
• Classification done in maps

27. Associate Topics with Subjects
topicSubjectTable: relationship table
• Establish relationships between topics and subjects
• Tools can then retrieve content relative to a combination of subjects
• First column is reserved for references to content
• Subsequent columns are reserved for subjects that classify the content

28. topicSubjectTable Example
Header

29. topicSubjectTable Example
Relations

30. Social Engagement
How can it help?
We can’t be everywhere at once
• We know about our own products: how they work, how to install them,
configure them, etc.
• We don't know all the potential use cases for our products
• We don't always know how our customers will be using our products, how
they will be integrated into larger systems
Social Engagement can help
• Build up the knowledge base with contributions from the field:
how-to articles, tips, videos
• Improve the quality and timeliness of the knowledge by allowing readers to
make comments
• Signal approval and relevance using "Like“
• Users spread the word to others who may find the knowledge useful
• Collect metrics on what content is accessed, how often, by who

31. Can a Wiki Provide Effective Social
Engagement?
How can Wikis help
• Allows information to be provided on a modular basis
• Allows customers to modify the content themselves
Why Wikis are not enough
• No easy way to extract changes made on the wiki and incorporate into the
source content set
• No easy way to control and authorize changes
• Comments and articles submitted by one customer may not be relevant to
all customers: wikis do not allow contextualization
• Does not allow customers to build their own documents and training from
multiple content modules
• Difficult to customize the format and usability of different types of content; it
all looks and behaves the same
• No way to make content interactive

32. Social Knowledgebase
Dynamic Enterprise Intelligent Content
• Variety of content: documentation, videos, how-to articles, safety
information, data sheets, marketing material
• Subject filtering: leverage subject scheme to enable quick, goal-oriented
access to contextually useful content
• Personalized docs: allow readers to assemble content on demand and
render to PDF for print and ePub for offline mobile access
• Audience Participation: allow your audience to add new content, make
comments on existing content, express approval, and easily share content
with others

33. Let’s see it in action
[SuiteShare DEMO]

34. Hmmm, this looks interesting…
For additional information, contact:
Joe Gelb
solutions@suite-sol.com
U.S. Office EMEA Office
(609) 360-0650 +972-2-993-8054
www.suite-sol.com