In a recent guest post at the Content Wrangler, Sean Healey of Wild Basin Media notes that the adoption rate of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is on the rise:
While its growth stems from and is most apparent across those organizations that publish technical documentation, DITA is certainly not limited to technical publication departments. Because of its specialization feature, DITA is now viewed by a variety of businesses as a stable, low-cost solution to all sorts of documentation from marketing to financial reports to training material and so on. By some estimates, up to 80 percent of new XML publishing implementations will be DITA-based by the middle of 2009.
Also on the rise, Healey reports, is the use of video deployed to the Web. Here are just a few noteworthy stats:
- On average, 100 million videos are streamed from YouTube every day.
- 65,000 new video clips are uploaded every day.
- 13 million viewers visit YouTube every month.
Healey asks, ”Why haven’t we seen more video integrations within structured documentation implementations such as DITA?
At face value, video would seem to be a perfect fit with task-based procedural documentation because of its ability to show how to do a task or series of tasks.
The lack of such implementations is due in part because “most viewers will not watch 10 minutes of video to find 30 seconds of relevant material.”
Many how-to video companies provide users with search capabilities; however, the level of granularity for these videos is usually too high to be applied to technical, task-based documentation where the ability to quickly find and understand discrete steps is key.
Video chunked into relatively large pieces by typical methods is as unwieldy as coarsely-chunked unstructured documentation. Content reuse and searchability become at best difficult or at worse impossible.
In the rest of the post, Healey elaborates on how new video standards (such as the MPEG-7 multimedia content description standard) and practices now make it possible to merge video seamlessly into structured documentation for the Web, with greater control over its management, search, and presentation.
He explores the possibility of using DITA-based topics, with video links to show how to complete a discrete step or procedure.
We have all used search engines that allow us to enter criteria that return topics where the text is found. What if we entered search terms that take us to a particular video segment that demonstrates how to complete a specific task? What if we could browse clickable thumbnails to find relevant video segments? What if every time a video segment displays, its associated text-based topic displays as well?
In addition to camara-generated video, Healey explains that software-generated video (that is, screen capture software such as Camtasia, Jing, Captivate, and IShowU) can be segmented, managed, and deployed in the same way.
For example, it is possible to re-purpose your existing walk-through video of your latest software product, so that video segments can be searched and viewed. Because each segment is allocated a unique id and associated with metadata, segments can be reordered and reused, where appropriate.
Healey imagines the benefits of using video in technical documentation, giving us a methodical way of viewing discrete steps within, for example, an airplane engine maintenance manual.
Mechanics could search across MPEG-7 repositories to find and view appropriate video segments and read the associated DITA-based documentation adjacent it for further reference. Because many parts and procedures are identical across plane models, standard reuse and effectivity principles can be employed for video in the same way as for text-based content.
Just as task-based documentation is modularized so that new documents can be created from pieces of existing text, video segments, each assigned a unique id, can be reordered into new configurations. In short, the same themes (for example, reuse, modularization, metadata employed for increased searchability, reduction of information redundancy) that run through the design of structured documentation can be applied to video with the help of MPEG-7 and associated technologies.
“In the near future, video will be an integral part of structured documentation, just as it has in the Web at large,” Healey predicts.
For the complete post, including more detailed information on the role of MPEG-7 in topic-based video, see Healey’s The Rise of Topic-Based Video in Task-Based Documentation: Is It Time For DITA and Video? at the Content Wrangler.
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