Tools and S1000D – Catching up to DITA?
Posted on November 1, 2007
Category Tools | 2 Comments
In the not so distant past, one of the key differentiators between DITA and S1000D was the availability of specialized tools to support either standard. There were lots of tools to support DITA compared to the few that directly supported S1000D. But that’s changing.
S1000D is a technical publication standard for documenting maintenance and parts information for equipment. It’s a collaboration between several agencies, including Air Transport Association (ATA), the Aerospace and Defense Industries Association of Europe (ASD), and Aerospace Industries Association (AIA). It’s intended to provide a standard that can be used by both civil and military manufacturers to document their products. It gives aircraft industries a single standard with which to document both military and civilian equipment.
Like DITA, it is based on the concept of content components and moves away from the approach of separate maintenance guides, troubleshooting guides, and parts catalogs. And since it is component focused, like DITA, people like to compare the two as approaches to technical documentation for equipment. Should I use DITA or S1000D is a question on the mind of many technical writers.
For the technologically focused, they could always counter arguments for S1000D with the “tools†card: vendors have lagged behind offering specific support for S1000D as a standard. And it was true. All the big component CMS vendors were trotting their DITA versions to the market, with specialized map editing, support for conrefs and selection attributes, and bundling the DITA Open Toolkit for output. S1000D did not enjoy the same sort of support in tools.
But that is changing. SiberLogic recently announced their S1000D CMS version, to compliment their DITA version and their standard CMS offering. They join other companies like Corena (Life*S1000D), Inmedius (S1000D Suite), XyEnterprise (Contenta S1000D), who offer a product specifically focused on S1000D content creation. There are not quite as many CMS vendors offering specialized support for S1000D, but the gap is definitely closing.
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Very good article.
The fact is that S1000D is more complicated than DITA. It is a very specifc standard geared towards Aerospace and Defense. There will always be only a few select vendors who have the domain experts to deal with the complexity of the S1000D. It goes way beyond a traditional XML standard.
S1000D requires consistent and significant investment from the software vendor. Not only on getting the first deal, but keeping the product up-to-date based on the standard changing. It’s not a standard in which you can “dip your foot in”. This has been tried by a number of vendors and they are no longer in the market. In reality its a very small market with a very high learning curve.
DITA will never be S1000D. S1000D will never be DITA. Nor should they. These constant comparisons are fun to read, but practioners know that sometimes standards exist for a specific reason. I think its safe to say S1000D is a “stand-alone” standard for a number of good reasons.
Best Regards,
G. Schaffer
Hi Gary,
Thanks for the feedback. You’ve made excellent points.
One additional point that I should have added is that there are different motivations for adopting S1000D and DITA. In the aviation industries, it is and/or may be a market or contractual requirement to produce S1000D content. And so some people have no choice but to deal with it as best they can. Having a variety of tools available makes it more likely that they will find a good technology fit for them.
For companies that see S1000D as a good approach for them — maybe non-aviation equipment manufacturers — can evaluate S1000D, knowing that there are more tools available, more options to choose from.
Implementing DITA is not a contractual obligation for most current adopters. None the less, it’s popularity as a standard can be matched to the increase in availability of specialized tools to support it.
I expect that S1000D as a standard will see some of the same results as more tools become available.