Monday ~ 12 February 2024
Lassoism & DITA: Winning with Knowledge Graphs
This presentation, “Lassoism & DITA: Winning with Knowledge Graphs” explores how the principles of teamwork and optimism, inspired by Ted Lasso, apply to integrating DITA and Knowledge Graphs. It highlights the benefits of structured, reusable content in DITA and the power of Knowledge Graphs for connecting data and enhancing content discoverability. By leveraging automation and overcoming challenges, the synergy between these technologies creates a winning strategy for content management, ensuring smarter workflows, improved user experiences, and future-ready content delivery.
Sweta Bhagat, ServiceNow
Sweta Bhagat is an integral part of the Experience team at ServiceNow, bringing over 17 years of experience in technical writing. She excels in collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver exceptional product experiences for end-users. Combining problem-solving skills with a content strategist mindset, she brings a mix of tech smarts and creative flair to the table, spreading her craft excellence to her team, sharing information, and finding solutions that help the entire community in the Experience team.
Drawing a Blank? Writing & Editing Tips for Flawless Content
The quality of your technical content directly impacts how users experience your product. This presentation will cover the top writing and editing best practices that will elevate the clarity, consistency, and effectiveness of your content. I’ll dive into common mistakes to avoid, along with techniques for writing clear, concise documentation that resonates with your audience. Attendees will also learn how to set up structured editing and peer review processes that maintain high content standards across teams.
Dipo Ajose-Coker, MadCap Software
After relocating to France in 2005, Dipo completed an MA in Multilingual and Multimedia Document Conception at the Université Paris Cité. He then spent 18 years combining his love for language and IT skills in various roles, serving as a structured and unstructured content technical writer, DITA migration project leader, technical editor, and proofreader in the Fintech and MedTech device industries.
In 2021, Dipo transitioned into Content Creation and Marketing. Acting as the crucial link between developers and the end users, occupying the sweet spot between expectation and delivery, Dipo represents both the voice of the user and that of the software developer, acting as the quintessential middleman.
Dipo is now the Product Marketing Manager at MadCap Software, shepherding an ecosystem of Technical Documentation and Learning & Development authoring tools and component content management systems.
Feel free to connect with and follow Dipo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dipocoker/
DITA and Data Fabric: Enterprise Content and Data Integration
As organizations grapple with the complexities of connecting disparate data systems, Data Fabric technologies emerge as a promising solution. This session will explore the parallels between Data Fabric and DITA, highlighting shared principles such as flexibility, reusability, and metadata-driven automation.
A panel of experts from the Content Component Alliance (CCA) will examine the relationship between DITA and Data Fabric, exploring how structured content standards can enhance user experiences and support robust business analysis.
The panel will discuss the impact of recent AI advancements on Data Fabric architectures and structured content systems, and address critical questions:
How does DITA fit within a Data Fabric framework?
In what ways can it enrich data context and usability?
How has AI changed the capabilities of these systems?
How can DITA contribute to enabling advanced AI capabilities within a Data Fabric architecture?
Join us as we discuss how integrating DITA with Data Fabric technologies can unlock new possibilities for data connectivity and analysis in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Toni Byrd Ressaire, Technically Write IT
Fabrice Lacroix, Fluid Topics
She is a researcher and practitioner in AI machine language models and technologies since 2016. Toni lectures at MTU in the MSc for Technical Communication and formerly was on faculty at James Madison University (JMU) in the USA.
Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a web pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
Delivering Targeted and Relevant Online Information
Users have no trouble finding information—they can simply open a manual or search online. The real challenge comes when they need to decide if the information they find, or receive from a chatbot, is truly relevant to their specific situation. Often, users encounter information meant for different tasks, product models, software/hardware variants, or user roles. While they can sometimes quickly dismiss irrelevant content, this process can be confusing and lead them to mistakenly believe some information applies to their case, when an expert would say otherwise.
Jonatan Lundin, Excosoft
Jonatan is a senior information architect specializing in technical communication, currently working at Excosoft in Sweden. He earned his PhD in 2020 from Mälardalen University, focusing on the design of manuals. With over 30 years of experience in the field, Jonatan has primarily worked with topic-based XML content management. As a former member of OASIS, he contributed to the development of DITA 1.2 through the Machine Industry Subcommittee. As a regular speaker at major technical communication conferences, including SIGDOC, ISDOC, tcworld, NORDIC Techkomm, STVY, FTI, DITA Europe, and STC India, Jonatan enjoys engaging with peers to explore design challenges and innovations in the field.
Classification Madness: Applying a Corporate Taxonomy to DITA
ServiceNow maintains a corporate taxonomy for its products, which was only weakly reflected in the product documentation. As part of a larger corporate information customer satisfaction improvement initiative, Product Content implemented a process to classify the ServiceNow Platform product documentation using the taxonomy. This process involved both automatic and authored classification, including the use of SubjectScheme maps to drive both authoring and delivery of content on servicenow.com/docs. This paper presents the implementation decisions we made, describes how our classification processes works, and outlines the governance and maintenance processes for managing the classifications as the taxonomy and content evolves.
Eliot Kimber & Scott Hudson, ServiceNow
Eliot Kimber is a founding and current member of the DITA Technical Committee and a long-time speaker and writer on DITA and other structured markup subjects. Eliot has worked to apply DITA to many different industries, including commercial publishing as well as many different technical domains. Eliot is co-editor of ISO/IEC 10744:1996, HyTime, and a founding member of the W3C XML Working Group. When not bending DITA-based publishing systems to his will, Eliot lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter. Eliot holds a black belt in Aikido and is an avid cook.
Scott Hudson is a Senior Staff Technical Content Architect at ServiceNow. He is also a long-time member of the OASIS DocBook and DITA Technical Committees. He specializes in content architecture, optimizing the DITA authoring experience, creating author assistance using Schematron and Vale, and evaluating new information technologies. He is a shameless Sci-Fi geek and head referee for Colorado FIRST Lego League. Visit his blog at: http://shudson310.blogspot.com
Green UX
To control the carbon footprint of technical content, we must understand what content is delivered, to whom, and in which formats and channels, and also why. That does not mean we need to compromise with our audiences’ requirements. For example, designing answers that are easy to find will improve our footprint and will also provide a better User Experience to our end-users.
Minimalistic content requires good findability of the content, practical, user-focused tasks and error resistance… Content professionals need to embrace minimalism and bring instructional design into play to create and deliver “greener”, and frankly, more user-friendly documentation. We’ll be talking about instructional design best practices, plain language and controlled terminology.
Nolwenn Kerzeho, MadCap Software
Nolwenn Kerzreho is IXIA CCMS Solutions Architect for MadCap Software. She has experience helping DITA adoption and CCMS adoption projects in a variety of industries, regulated or not, for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
Using MS Excel to Analyze Large Volumes of DITA XML
What tools do you use to analyze large volumes of DITA XML for conversion or migration projects? Do you use CCMS built-in features, Oxygen tools, XQuery, or XSL to parse through copious quantities of content? What if you could leverage common desktop tools in a very uncommon way to pull out problematic patterns in your XML or generate volumes of valid DITA?
Rob Hanna has developed robust techniques for using Microsoft Excel over the past 20 years to plan, analyze, refactor, and execute large DITA XML projects. In this session, Rob will demonstrate some of the tools he has built in MS Excel to create content plans and build DITA stub topics to analyzing links, structures, and syntax for large collections of DITA XML. He will walk through beginner steps towards parsing through text-based content to build out XML strings and code using only native Excel features and formulas. He will take the session participants through some very basic Excel VBA code using MS XML to walk an XML tree and validate DITA XML.
Rob Hanna, Precision Content
Rob Hanna has dedicated his professional life to improving outcomes for teams embarking on structured authoring projects. Over the past 30 years, he has worked with many large corporations on DITA and CCMS projects to bring their teams into structure and drive operational efficiencies. He has taught metadata and taxonomies at the University of Toronto and private courses on structured authoring, DITA, and information architecture. In 2013, Rob founded Precision Content in Toronto, Canada, to build a team of writers, developers, and IAs to continue his mission to raise the bar in Technical Communication.
Linting Strings – Running Style Checks on UI Text
How do we make sure that user interface text follows the company style guide?
If you work at a large company, you may have access to style checks via your CMS, localization management platform, or commercial language quality tools – but what if you don’t have that kind of budget?
Many of these solutions are designed to work with long-form text in technical documentation, support articles, or other web content but what about UI text?
How can we catch errors in the design phase before UI concepts are handed off to developers? How can we help developers to follow best practices and custom style rules? How can we make sure the content team notices when strings are updated? How can we build content quality gates into our review workflows?
We’ll explore how open-source tools can be used to streamline the QA process, allowing lone writers, small teams, and larger organizations to keep UI copy consistent, and do more with less.
Roger Fienhold Sheen, infotexture
Roger is a Content Operations consultant helping teams to design product information that is easy to understand, re-use, and maintain. He advises clients on how writers, designers, and developers can work together to create high-quality product content.
In his spare time, he serves as the documentation lead for the DITA Open Toolkit project.
Enrich your DITA: iiRDS Content Delivery with the DITA-OT
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Mark Schubert & Marion Knebel, parson AG
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