XML
Flatirons Solutions is a leader in defining XML methodologies and solutions to address the complexities and rigorous demands of high-end content delivery needs in such industries as Aerospace, High-Tech Manufacturing, and Commercial Publishing
From its inception, Flatirons articulated an optimized approach for supporting those who were challenged with volumes of changing information that needed to be assembled to order based on product version, variation, and locale. As an early proponent, refiner and adopter of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and DocBook XML standards, Flatirons envisioned a way to synthesize a number of emerging technologies to deliver an XML publishing solution. Through extensive committee work and conference workshops, Flatirons has played leadership role in defining where the content industry needs to be to support the unique requirements of high-end content delivery and how to leverage such effective query tools as XPath and XQuery.
Because of Flatirons’ seasoned history in the ever-changing content marketplace, we understand the importance of future-proofing solutions by leveraging industry standards. Flatirons developed XML-based solutions utilize existing standards but are positioned for the new technologies that we know will emerge tomorrow.
Contributing DITA Open Toolkit stylesheets to SourceForge, an open source project, Flations work benefits the larger community. Our latest submission is a DITA-DocBook Interoperability Framework which allows you to work seamlessly with applications architected in one standard that need to interoperate with applications coded in the other standard. It is no surprise that when the industry thinks of XML leadership and innovation, it thinks of Flatirons Solutions.
Two senior business architects at Flatirons have been instrumental in moving many of the DITA and DocBook standards forward. In their blogs, Jim Earley and Scott Hudson offer their insightful views of the industry and are helping shape the conversation of where the industry goes next.
Industry Involvement
IDEAlliance
As a board member and officer, Flatirons CTO Eric Severson provides leadership to this industry consortium that supports XML and publishing industry conferences, certifications, and training. Fellow board members include executives from Time, Inc., Microsoft, McGraw-Hill, Wolters-Kluwer, R.R. Donnelly, and Conde Nast.
OASIS DocBook Technical Committee
As the Chair for DocBook for Commercial Publishing subcommittee and a standing member of the technical committee, we provide leadership in developing and maintaining the DocBook family of specifications.
OASIS DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) Technical Committee
As a member, we further the industry by supporting this technical committee's initiatives. This OASIS DITA Technical Committee is chartered to define and maintain the Darwin Information Typing Architecture and promote the use of the architecture for creating standard information types and domain-specific markup vocabularies. In addition, we serve as members and leaders on the following subcommittees:
- DITA for Enterprise Business Documents technical subcommittee chartered to advance a document creation and management specification that builds content reuse into the authoring process.
- DITA for Learning and Training Content technical subcommittee chartered to promote best practices for applying standard DITA approaches to learning content (serve as secretary).
OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee
As a member, Flatirons supports the efforts of this technical committee chartered to standardize Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information sharing across content management repositories from different vendors
