FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 12, 2009
News Release in Japanese
TOKYO, February 12, 2009 – IBM Japan, Ltd., Antenna House, Inc., JustSystems Corporation, and Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd. today announced that the four firms, as founders, have established “DITA Consortium Japan” aimed at disseminating and providing education about DITA, an international standard that revolutionizes corporate document creation processes.
DITA stands for “Darwin Information Typing Architecture,” a technical specification for compartmentalizing documentation and for systematizing the process of document creation. It devides a document into modules and assembles them using structured information.
DITA was originally developed by IBM as a document creation and management standard for the company's own technical documentation, and is now an international, OASIS (Note 1) standard. It enables quality control and productivity improvement in the document production, including product manuals, specifications, operating manuals and business procedure instructions, and is being introduced in the United States and Europe, mainly in the manufacturing, telecommunications and financial industries.
(Note 1) Established in 1993, OASIS is a non-profit international consortium that promotes the development, integration and introduction of open standards for the global information society. Alongside W3C, it is one of the world’s leading standards organizations and is involved in issues concerning the Internet, e-commerce, XML and document formats. More than 600 organizations and 5,000 or more individual members from 100 countries around the world currently participate in OASIS.
In the manufacturing of industrial products, productivity and quality have been improved through the standardization and sharing of components. It is only logical that the same method should be applied to documentation, in product manuals, for example. However, as document creation and management involves processes that are linked with individual skills, a rational creation method that treats documents as standard industrial products had not previously been available.
DITA is an architecture that allows standardization and uniformity in document creation, as well as improvement of production efficiency. Increasingly, many case examples are seen in the United States and in Europe of DITA being introduced into a company's documentation management, and this trend is expected to spread to Japan in the near future. In fact, some Japanese companies that operate overseas have started studies and are considering the introduction of DITA. There is, however, limited experience and information within the country, making this a difficult process.
Against this backdrop, the four Japanese companies deeply involved in DITA (IBM Japan, Antenna House, JustSystems and Fuji Xerox) have jointly established “DITA Consortium Japan,” with a view to gathering and disclosing information and know-how on DITA technology, creating successful model cases of DITA introduction within Japan, as well as establishing a new “Component Publishing” market that DITA envisions.
DITA Consortium Japan aims to contribute to the improvement of document creation methods and processes in Japanese companies, and to create a new market related to DITA.
To this end, the Consortium will solicit the participation of new members establishing working groups by theme, and will pursue the following activities:
Members will be able to view a range of information and the results of research and studies conducted by working groups, which will be published on the Consortium website. Members can thus have access to the latest technical information and case studies in Japan and overseas, as well as know-how on systematization and other sources of practical information concerning the introduction of DITA. They will also be able to seize and foster new business opportunities through exchanges and connections with other Consortium members.
DITA Consortium Japan will hold a seminar celebrating its establishment, as detailed below. The event, which will be the first comprehensive educational seminar on DITA in Japan, marks the launch of the Consortium's activities.
| Date/Time | 13:30 – 17:30, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 |
| Place | Hakozaki Office, IBM Japan, Ltd. 19-21 Hakozaki-cho, Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo http://www-06.ibm.com/jp/iscj/location/hakozaki.html |
| Capacity | 150 persons |
| Admission | Free |
| Themes (Note 2) |
(Note 2) Themes are subject to change.
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| Name | DITA Consortium Japan |
| Date of establishment | Thursday, February 12, 2009 |
| Representative | Norihiro Shimogaki, President
(Director, Information Management, Software, IBM Japan, Ltd.) |
| Office location | 1-2-3 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-8640
(located at JustSystems Corporation) |
| Official website | http://www.dita-jp.org (Japanese only) |
| Organization |
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| Annual Membership Fee |
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Initially devised for efficient documentation management within IBM, DITA is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing and delivering technical information. It is currently an OASIS standard, and by dividing technical documents into modules, DITA realizes significant improvements in the quality and speed of document creation and management, as well as in lowering related costs. We hope that DITA Consortium Japan will help DITA get disseminated in Japan, and contribute to improved productivity of document management at corporations.
The purpose of setting a document in XML is to enable multiple utilization of the created contents. Since its approval as an OASIS standard in 2005, use of DITA has quickly spread throughout the United States and Europe, because DITA is valued as the optimal standard for contents reuse. The popularization of standard specifications such as DITA enables experts in particular fields to compare and verify their experiences over a common platform, or to share existing tools. We hope that DITA Consortium Japan will rapidly become a useful forum for sharing information and learning from each other.
DITA is becoming popular in the United States and Europe as a standardization technology that supports integrated management of a variety of contents, as it significantly enhances the efficiency of the document creation processes. In Japan, too, DITA is gaining recognition as an indispensible architecture, mainly within the manufacturing and financial industries where revolutionary reform of their document creation processes is necessary. Our company will actively contribute to the promotion of DITA usage, as well as market creation through the Consortium’s activities, utilizing our long experience gained through marketing a number of document creation tools, including “Ichitaro” and “xfy.”
The major benefit of the DITA architecture, as we see it, is that it enables division of the document structure and its contents during the document creation process, as well as the reuse of contents. As technical innovation proceeds, related data needs to be updated according to the specifications of new technologies. Standardized technology such as DITA that is capable of universally passing on the updated content to the next generation achieves effective communication and management of knowledge, which Fuji Xerox has been aiming at since our foundation. We believe it is important to leverage such technology. We will actively contribute to the development of DITA and further technical innovation through the Consortium's work by drawing upon our global expertise in document creation and related translation outsourcing business, contracted in conjunction with Xerox Corporation of the United States.
DITA Consortium Japan Secretariat (located at JustSystems Corporation)