Christian Kravogel

Chairman of the DITA Machine Industry Subcommittee at OASIS and owner of SeicoDyne.

Chris Kravogel is Chairman of the DITA Machine Industry Subcommittee at OASIS and since 2004 has been a voting member of the DITA Technical Committee. He graduated as an Electrical Engineer at the University of Applied Science in Lucerne, Switzerland and as an Executive Master of Business Studies at the School of Business Lucerne. After working as technical author and head of the documentation department of an international corporation for several years, he started work as a consultant for technical documentation and XML. Since 2004 his company SeicoDyne has supported many companies in the machinery, pharmaceutical, and software industries in implementing DITA-based authoring environments, CMS, TMS, XSL-FO, process developments, and much more.

DITA 1.2 Machinery Industry Specification

This presentation answers the question of how DITA can be used in the machinery and automotive industry, covers the key points in DITA 1.2 (Hazard Statements and Task Requirements domains), and gives you a sneak preview in the developments for the next DITA releases.

Mark Speyer

Independent consultant

Marc Speyer is an independent consultant with extensive experience in architecting and implementing conversion and single source publishing solutions. Prior to being an independent consultant Marc worked at Stilo, Cap Gemini and Wolters Kluwer as a lead architect and project manager for editorial, content management, and publishing applications. Marc has been working with mark-up languages (XML and SGML) since 1995 and has a thorough understanding of XML-based standards, tools, and techniques that can be leveraged to the delivery of tangible business results. He has a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology, is a highly regarded expert in the field of electronic publishing solutions, frequent speaker at international conferences and active contributor to standardization committees.

DITA 1.2 feature overview

Learn about the new exciting features of the DITA 1.2 specification which includes several additions, including a Learning and Training specialization, a Machine-industry specialization, new support for glossary entries and acronyms and abbreviations, and the ability to constrain the standard DITA information types. For technical communicators who need to use a sequence of steps in multiple tasks, DITA 1.2 now offers the ability to reference a range of elements. With the new "conref push" mechanism, technical communicators will be able to permit designated customers to "automatically insert" specific content into the source text upon processing, such as brand-related terminology or other content, all without changing the source. These are only a small part of the improvements in the 1.2 specification. Marc Speyer is an active contributor of the Oasis DITA Adoption Technical committee and therefore well positioned to present the why and how of these new features.