The standard is issued by OASIS, the US-headquartered global consortium for open standards in the information society, which aims to boost the convergence of technical and training documentation within engineering and process-oriented industries, such as the machine plants, semiconductor, automotive, financial, pharmaceutical, translation, and defense industries.

Today, instructional authors who design technical-training sessions in large engineering, manufacturing, and process-based industries need to cope with the fact that about ninety percent of their input materials come from disparate sources within their organisations. Typically, these include the product and plant engineering, design, and marketing departments - all of which use different content-packaging and exchange standards (for example, DocBook, ePub, IETM and/or S1000D).

All of these differ from the standards commonly used in training tools and platforms - such as SCORM, IMS and AICC content-packaging and tracking-interchange formats. This lack of a common interoperability format across the technical documentation, training platforms, and tools limits the type of documents that training departments can receive as input from their technical counterparts to Word, PDF and HTML, for example.

The DITA Learning & Training specialization addresses this gap and brings new life to content interoperability across and within large organisations dealing with massive and rapid technical documentation and training materials production flows.

A ninety-minute webinar on DITA is being offered 23 May at 17:00 Central European Time. Seats are free but limited and granted on a first-come-first-served basis. In the webinar, Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of eXact learning solutions North America, will explain the need for new-generation structured-content-management standards and the benefits of adopting DITA.

Mr. Cardinali will outline how the new standard compares with and can be integrated into other learning-content formats such as SCORM Content Packaging and IMS Common Cartridge. In the presentation, the speaker will combine theory with a practical hands-on demonstration using the new DITA content-authoring and management plug-in for the eXact LCMS and eXact Mobile platforms to import state-of-the-art DITA documentation and convert it to SCORM and AICC formats for online and mobile learning.

In addition to this free online webinar, eXact learning solutions is also running a range of closed DITA seminars for content strategists in large organisations, as well as a series of open workshops at public events and venues throughout Europe and the USA. The next workshop will be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on 07 June in connection with the DITA Information Energy 2012 conference.