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As a consultant, I'm often parachuted into complex projects and need to be able to appear intelligent in a short period of time to both technical staff as well as business people. In setting up a publishing system based on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), I'm faced with trying to communicate the specialized structures and element names needed by an organization.

One of the most important principals of DITA specialization is the concept of inheritance. Inheritance allows you to use the structures and semantics previously defined by others as a starting point for your specializations. But how do you communicate this idea in a repeatedly simple clear concise manner during the design process? If a picture is worth a thousand words, a UML model is invaluable.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a graphical notation that is particularly good at expressing object-oriented designs. UML went through a standardization process and is now an Object Management Group (OMG) standard.

I like using UML because it allows me to communicate certain concepts more clearly than alternatives like natural language. Natural language is too imprecise and subject to interpretation by the reader. A DITA DTD or Schema is very precise but not something that should be created during the design process. So I use UML to communicate and keep track of the important details like inheritance.

A lot of people talk about the learning curve associated with UML. I'm not advocating that team members need to be exposed to all that UML can provide. Only the parts necessary to convey the important details of the moment.

Let's say that we want to build a new type of DITA topic for creating slide presentations. The following diagram conveys a lot of information:

My conversation with the assembled audience of technical staff and business users would go something like this:

Each green ellipse represents an element already in existence. Each yellow ellipse represents a proposed element. The double angle brackets in the ellipse are used in UML to define sterotypes. A sterotype is the vocabulary extension mechanism built into UML. In our case we are using sterotypes to indicate which organization (DITA or SGMLXML) an element reports to. The dotted lines represent which elements are included in others and which elements extend a base type (inheritance).

Once the audience agrees that the model is correct, it can be included in the specifications and developers can create the new elements and the properly-formed class attributes required.

In our example the definition of the class attributes in the resulting DTD would look like this:

Besides communicating DITA specialization information, I also use UML for other aspects of my deployments such as use case design, system deployment and various activity diagrams. No single model is sufficient to build the system but by using the same modeling language for all the models, it is easy to impart all of the important analysis, design and implementation decisions that must be made by an organization before deployment.

-Charles Angione

The Arbortext crew in Ann Arbor is getting a new workspace. As I write this, many hardworking and dedicated employees at 1000 Victors Way are packing up their offices and preparing to move down the street to a new building.

Victors Way — what a noble address! I first came to the four-story building 11 years ago as a potential customer. It was the middle of the December, and I was meeting with a sales rep and some lead engineers to show them a proposal featuring Arbortext. I remember Ivan, my sales rep, later telling me that everyone was eager to meet someone willing to come to Ann Arbor in December!

I came back to Victors Way the following year for the Annual Users Group Conference (AUGI) held in Ann Arbor. What a fun and memorable event! Arbortext made sure that just about anyone a customer might want to speak with was at the conference. I remember watching the trepidation on the faces of some engineers as they walked across the street, their eyes full of dread and looks that said, “Oh no! I have to talk to a customer!”

But that kind of openness and innovation is what gave Arbortext the reputation it maintains today — fiercely dedicated to standards and open at all levels of the organization, from the CEO to the engineer that built a feature.

Eventually, I joined Arbortext as a consultant, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. In addition to an amazing career, I’ve gained a wonderful extended family. When I came in for my job interview, it took my interviewers 20 minutes to get me to the conference room because we kept running into people I knew along the way!

Ever since I became part of the Arbortext team, returning to Ann Arbor (no matter what the season) has always felt like coming home. I see friends that I stay in touch with but don’t get to visit with in person very often. I make sure to stop by every office, no matter what floor, and chat with people that I’m genuinely happy to see.

One of my earliest major assignments at Arbortext involved creating one of the first linkbases in existence. At that time, the XLink standard was brand new. During those early days, I often found myself standing outside in the middle of the night next to one of the walkway lamps that light the entranceway. I’d look up at the ARBORTEXT sign on the building while I smoked like a chimney and prayed that the application would actually work! Eventually it did work, but only after some pain and suffering.

The four floors of 1000 Victors Way represent more than a decade of my life. Although the facilities in the new building are far superior for the Ann Arbor crew of today, I will always look back at the Victors Way building with fondness, and I will stop by when I’m in town. The Ann Arbor crew and Arbortext customers should be proud of what was accomplished within those walls, and I hope they are as excited as I am about what will come out of the new facility.

I can’t wait to reflect on what happens during the next decade.

-Charles Angione