[oXygen-user] No Framework for NLM?

[Wendell Piez]

Dear Eliot,

At 06:26 PM 9/29/2010, Eliot Kimber wrote:
>On 9/29/10 4:46 PM, "Wendell Piez" <> wrote:
> > So a journal publisher may start with NLM as an interchange format
> > for materials submitting to Pubmed Central. But then they discover
> > that investments made there can pay off further back in the document
> > workflow. There are already some early movers using NLM variants
> > behind production systems (some of them not small). This means there
> > is opportunity for editing applications in this space, if not for
> > much authoring as such (conversion vendors and applications will
> > still have a role as long as word processors don't go away), then at
> > least for copy editing and document QA.
> >
> > While in comparison to, say, DITA (which serves the needs of a
> > different sort of document production), the uptake of the NLM JATS
> > ("Journal Article Tag Set") will be slow, there's also no reason to
> > think it won't also be steady and, eventually, strong.
>
>Not if I have anything to do with it :-)
>
>That is, I would much rather define a STM vocabulary set for DITA that
>includes OOTB to-NLM transforms than encourage any of my clients to author
>in NLM directly.

Well, of course you would. And then your clients will have a business 
decision to make.

This list isn't the place to argue comparisons between different 
vocabularies or how they fit into hypothetical production systems, 
document workflows or business models. So I'll content myself with 
saying that (a) they are different, and comparisons between their 
different strengths and weaknesses is possible and necessary; and (b) 
XML has been successful largely because it isn't locked down to a 
single tag set. (At least IMO, this has been a big factor.)

If it were more important to use a single vocabulary than to address 
our local requirements, we'd all be using HTML. Or something.

Cheers,
Wendell


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