Birgit +31(0)631910162

Use

of XML in practice

Other kind of publications

A magazine about building, information about a certain region, rules to a board game: there are many different kinds of information. They can be published in as many different ways: books, magazines, on the Internet and so on.

It is convenient if you don’t have to decide upfront on how your information is published, that your information is structured in such a way that you have the freedom to choose later on. Topic based writing and XML are fitting for almost all information. That is always a good foundation.

 

Educational material

Adaptive learning, customized learning, getting the best out of the student: those are the challenges for publishers of educational material. In order to do so you need the right strategy and good structured and meta dated content. Educational material must meet many demands: in a didactic manner, with regard to content but also in regard to structure.

Interactive questions, tests and exercises play an important role within educational content. Schools examine these test and study materials in different ways; through (work-)books, in web applications or a combination of both. So it makes sense to develop your content medium-neutral as much as possible by using XML.

There are international standards for educational content: QTI and DITA Training & Learning. The advantage of using such standards is that tooling already exists, as well for creation, administration and publication. The advantage of DITA L&T is that you can specialize it for your own needs. Furthermore, I already developed a open source DITA L&T extension called LCE with many extra question types. A good basis for educational content.

In a content analysis we can find out whether a standard like DITA L&T (with or without LCE) or QTI is best for your content, or if a special XML schema is needed.

Technical documentation

There is technical documentation in many different shapes and sizes: end users manuals, business-to-business information, maintenance manuals, and so on. These have in common that they all describe a technical product. As user you want to be able to quickly find the relevant information you need at that moment. For example: how to clean the coffee machine, how to update software or how to install a certain part of an airplane.

Overview

To create – extensive – instruction and manuals can take a lot of time. Do you have products that are similar? Then you are at risk of having to write down the same information multiple times or to work with copy / paste. Even with small changes in your products, you soon start to loose the overall picture of what changes are needed in which manual.

Topic based writing

To prevent this from happening and to manage and publish your information efficiently, you can best use topic based writing. This means you write small information units (topics) which than are assembled in a separate document for publication. This way you can save information that is applicable for several products in topics instead of in specific product information. For topic based writing you can best use DITA.

Legal publications

Laws and regulations are important and have to be accessible to everyone. Therefore there are special governmental websites. But often these laws are not easy to understand so that it can be useful to add commentary. Also jurisprudence can contain much information about how to interpret a law or regulation.

Publishing laws and regulations with commentary and/or verdicts is a specialism. Nowadays professionals and even more common people don’t want thick (law-) books anymore, but tailored information. XML is a good format to achieve this.