Submitter's message ActionItems:
1. Stan will send out the working group's draft of where they want to go to TC.
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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 10 February 2026
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:
https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/wiki/Previous-agendas
Attendance:
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Robert Anderson, Stan Doherty, Kristen Eberlein, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Bob Johnson, Zoe Lawson, Christina Rothwell, Eric Sirois, Dawn Stevens, Frank Wegmann
Business
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Regrets: Leroy Steinbacher
1. Minutes
27 January 2026
https://groups.oasis-open.org/discussion/dita-tc-minutes-27-january-2026-uploaded (Harrison, 09 February 2026)
Kris moved, 2nd by Scott, approved by TC
2. Announcements
- Bob; DITA BUG meeting tomorrow on AI and how folks are using it
- Kris; I recommend it to everyone.
- Christina; yeah a great topic
- Scott; we're using Positron, very useful
- Christina; I would be interested in hearing about Positron.
- Kris; it would be good to follow up on that on this call,
- Zoe; I could use help in figuring out how to explain to engineers that 'you're doing it wrong.' When you talk about structured doc, they only want Markdown
- Eric; we have a number of clients that are dipping their toes, using Avelara (sp)?
- Kris; Mayo is very interested in AI, they have a number of projects, e.g. 'Iris' for federal health education materials; -Mayo wants content developers to use it, but it's pushing authoring from DITA to Word, which then has to get back to DITA.
- Scott; couple of our projects are about taking DITA and converting it to Markdown. OTOH, Mike Iantosca from Avelara has been really helpful.
- Eric; Avelara has spent a year building a system to go from DITA -> Markdown.
- Kris; we'll put this on next week's agenda.
3. Report back from DITA Europe and DITA-OT Day
---DITA-OT day
- Robert; DITA-OT day had around 60 people, some retrospective (this was the 10th one, or not...) some sessions intro-ing plugins, one with Fluid Topics, and MathML, also, Roger showed how to use Positron Assistant to make a DITA plugin.
- Frank; that's a good summary - good mixture, with retrospective, it reminded folks of how far that event has gone.
- Robert; event has definitely changed since beginning. some distinct themes over time, which have changed.
- Scott; the process that Radu demonstrated, to use Positron to help create plugins, was really cool.
- Robert; yeah, it was pretty impressive.
- Kris; anyone else using the Oxygen Positron add-on?
- Scott; we'll be using that at ServiceNow.
- Kris; I just tried it, I was really impressed with what it can do; I'm trying to get Mayo to buy me a license.
- Scott; and the config is super-easy. Eliot used a cloud thing to do a Relax-NG specialization. and you can do your own custom action; mine tags metadata.
- Zoe; right now AI is 'in' right now, but no one understands what to do with it.
---DITA Europe:
- Dawn; 140 people, all sessions were well attended, plus well-attended test kitchens. Right now, lots of AI talks, people wanted to hear what other folks were doing, I got good feedback/suggestions, we're getting much better attendance since we stopped being in Germany; it will be in Finland next year.
- Kris; has there ever been a DITA Europe in Sweden?
- Dawn; no, not once we moved it to Feb, Tekom does a February conference in Stockholm.
- Kris; I'd definitely go...
- Dawn; the issue is scheduling against/diluting other related conferences.
- Frank; this year's DITA Europe was fairly intense, pretty good preentations, I liked Leif as keynoter. there was a good mixture of regulars and newcomers in speakers, some non-AI, which was good, but not many. And folks really liked the technology test kitchens.
- Dawn; I try to make things flow...
- Robert; as Frank said, the keynote served as a good intro to the AI stuff that followed.
- Scott; it worked with the talk on what to use AI with, and what not to. Also, the IIRDS stuff was very useful.
- Dawn; we'll be doing IIRDS at Convex as well, on getting standards to work together.
- Kris; it's time to bring TC back to what IIRDS is doing in Tekom; it's a long saga. Bob, you and I were going to talk about this.
- Bob; right
4. 02-10-2026 TC Committee Notes Update
Since our last TC meeting two weeks ago, the group has done the following:
Completed a survey of HPE tech writers re: prioritized topics of interest (Christina).
Completed a rough outline for Brief Introduction to DITA for Writers (Stan).
At the next TC meeting, we'd like to walk through our updated charter.
See Committee Notes.
https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/wiki/DITA-TC-Committee-Notes
- Stan; going to be a slow slog; using a hunter/gatherer mode.
- Christina; we have over 200 writers, did a survey; everyone interested in DITA and AI, some in tagging, leveraging AI and DITA. I can get folks in my company to get reviews.
- Stan; I want to get back to TC with our committee's updated charter, I'll present it next week.
- Kris; how formal is your charter?
- Nancy; and this is for the WG, not for the TC, right?
- Kris; and Stan wants this to be a WG, not a formal subcommittee.
- Stan; we have a draft of where we think we want to go, want to put it in front of TC next week.
- Nancy; can you send it out before you present it?
- Stan; right, I'll send it out to TC the day before.
- Kris; question?
[none]
[return to AI discussion]
- Scott; wrt AI/Positron. now that Enterprise Oxygen has Positron, it gives you ability to use your own LLM endpoints. So one area to figure out; do you want to use in house LLM? or Oxygen's hosted service? Other issues are what your context prompts should be - that was presented by Alex at the conference - can the AI read your style guide, or context prompt rules?
- Kris; most companies don't have context promt schematron rules. otherwise you have to go thru yuor style guide. radu talked about how to feed style guide in and have postron create it for you.
- Kris; what does your style guide need to be in?
- Scott; if your style guide is in DITA, you can feed it to Positron.
- Kris; but what if style guide is stored in an AP press account, as we have at Mayo? We have a huge investment in ontology, but database is AP, and writers are writing in Word. (!)
- Scott; if they;re allowed to use Claude or ChapGPT; could try to have them create the Schematron..., but it's safer to do it thru Oxygen. might need a bit of copy/paste...
- Stan; useful to teach folks about Schematron; ChatGPT does a good job, but not Gemini or other AIs.
- Scott; issues; doing 'custom action', need a JSON config file and a Markdown file with our action. getting it to read files, rather than having to manually send them. And it's important to filter taxonomies you're using. if you have a really huge taxonomy, it's hard to pull from that.
- Kris; issue for DITA geeks: what can be done in DITA? what needs to be done in commercial products?
- Scott; wrt that, we might have to revisit some DITA features in a future release.
- Kris; right, do we need to extend DITA ontology for DITA 2.1?
11:25am ET close
-- Ms. Nancy Harrison
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Nancy Harrison
Principal, Infobridge Solutions
Nancy Harrison (Personal)
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