--- mcarr at allette.com.au wrote: > I consider DITA to be an interchange format. If two > organisations can figure out how to convert their own structure > to and from DITA, they can freely exchange data. Add five more > organisations and impose the same requirement on them and everyone can exchange data, whereas in the past, > each organisation would have to code the conversion > for all of their data partners. This is very powerful and very useful, but it doesn't replace the structure > that the organisations use on their own side. =================================================== I agree completely. The schema should be defined by the database/CMS requirements that a particular enterprise has developed to reflect its business model, not by the content creators, whose job it is to produce documents which can be parsed on the XML side into their constituent components for storage in accordance with the database schema. That requirement pertains also to the metadata (attributes) needed to manage the content, including those attributes which enable content to be selectively retrieved from the database in response to a user query. In many documentation systems (ATA, statutory, regulatory, et al), the principal method which users employ to retrieve the information thay desire is an unique number (or numbers) associated with the content of interest. That means there must be attributes which which carry this informaton, and those attributes must not only be used for retrieval, but also to apply the full and correct numbers to the extracted content. In other words autonumbering such as that used in FrameMaker cannot be used to produce the correct number when a piece of of a document is retrieved.
But the problem with using something like DITA for information interchange is that it is unlikely the metadata defined by DITA will match the metadata in the enterprise's database schema. Dan Emory & Associates FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing DW Emory <danemory7224 at sbcglobal.net>