Events • DITA-OT Day - Copenhagen 2025

February 16, 2025

Welcome to the DITA-OT Day 2025!

Once again, Oxygen XML Editor is proud to host the DITA-OT Day conference, the full-day event dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit project - the reference DITA implementation and the core of almost all DITA-based publishing solutions!

Building on the success of previous editions, DITA-OT Day will hold its 9th edition on February 16, 2025, in Copenhagen, Denmark. This on-site event will serve as the pre-conference day for DITA Europe, making it convenient for attendees to participate in both conferences back-to-back. Both events will be held at the Radisson Blu Scandinavia Hotel.

This free event is brought to you by Oxygen XML Editor with the help of the following DITA-OT Day supporters:

Agenda

8:00 - 8:30	Registration and welcome coffee
8:30 - 8:45	Welcome and sponsor presentation	DITA-OT Day Sponsors
8:45 - 9:00	News and announcements	DITA-OT Day Team
9:00 - 9:30	DITA OT New Features and Enhancements We'll go through the list of features and enhancements made to the DITA OT in the newest releases.	Jarno Elovirta - DITA-OT Main Developer
9:30 - 10:00	DITA-OT and DITA 2.0: who’s done what now? DITA-OT is not part of the OASIS standards organization, but the project does its best to keep up with changes in the standard. In this session, we’ll talk about what we expect from OASIS with DITA 2.0, what you can already make use of in DITA-OT, and what you can do to help make the rest of the features a reality.	Robert D Anderson - DITA-OT Project Lead
10:00 - 10:30	Documentation Developments This talk provides an overview of the recent changes to the DITA-OT documentation and project website, points out open issues, highlights ideas for future improvements, and closes with room for suggestions from the community and a call for contributions.	Roger Sheen - DITA-OT Documentation Lead
10:30 - 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 - 11:20	Welcome to DITA-OT Community: Where Code meets Passion Imagine a scenario where you are facing challenges while working with DITA Open Toolkit. You search for solutions online, check various forums and groups, but find no answers. You feel like you have no one else to turn to. However, there’s one group you haven’t reached out to yet – the DITA-OT community. A “hidden” network of DITA-OT experts, eager to share their knowledge and help you solve your problems. But how do you find them? Who are they? Who belongs to the DITA-OT community? What do we truly know about each other? Join me for this interactive session to get to know people who build the DITA-OT community. People who make it active. People without whom further development wouldn’t be possible. Perhaps by the end of this session, you might discover that we are not so different after all, that we all have something to learn, and we all sometimes need help and support. Bring your phone and an open mind! This session has been organized with the help of the core DITA-OT developers – don’t miss the chance to ask them your questions!	Justyna Hietala
11:20 - 11:40	Replacement keyspace constructor for Open Toolkit As of OT 4.2, the key space construct implementation works fine for smaller key spaces but fails with larger key spaces (10s or 100s of 1000s of keys). This paper presents an alternative key space construction implementation that handles arbitrarily large key spaces with reasonable performance and memory consumption.	Eliot Kimber Senior Staff Content Engineer
11:40 - 12:00	Learning Assessment QTI Output Working with DITA in a learning/training group, a challenging content type to work with is the <learningAssessment> topic. Sourcing these questions in DITA is ideal to facilitate reuse across content types and to allow them to be output to multiple formats. For many learning/training groups, the primary output of learning assessment content is a platform that delivers and scores electronic exams. Most of these systems work with an import of QTI (Question & Test Interoperability) XML. While each system’s implementation of QTI varies, there is a common structure that can be used as a starting point. I will show the DITA to QTI plug-in that Comtech has developed (and will be available on the plugins registry).	Brianna Stevens-Russell - Comtech Services
12:00 - 12:20	Building an Ant based environment around the DITA OT In our customer deployments we have built an Ant-based environment around the DITA OT which allows us to extract and prepare the content before it's sent to OT processing. We will discuss how this design could be replicated on disk without the use of a CCMS.	Eric Sirois - Madcap Software
12:30 - 14:00	Lunch
14:00 - 14:20	DITA-OT in the Age of AI: Bridging Technical Writing and Artificial Intelligence The DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) empowers technical writing by transforming traditional authoring practices into strategic content development. Learn how Technical Writers can create content with specifics to feed AI systems with high-quality, context-rich data. This enhances AI RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) models and LLMs (Large Language Models) by providing them with accurate, intent-specific information for improved training and response delivery. This session explores the critical role of DITA-OT in enabling proactive content authoring practices that align technical writing with AI enablement. Key discussion points include: How DITA-OT facilitates the transformation of structured content into AI-ready assets. The importance of metadata and taxonomy in enhancing context and intent for AI-driven applications. Best practices for transitioning from reactive to proactive content strategies using DITA-OT. Attendees will gain insights into how DITA-OT integrates technical writing with AI, driving superior user experiences and maximizing the value of knowledge-based systems.	Amit Siddhartha
14:20 - 14:50	Providing content to AI engines using DITA OT plugins Content from a DITA XML project can be used to provide information to an AI engine. In this presentation I will present two possible DITA OT plugin implementation: A DITA Open Toolkit plugin which creates fine tune material for AI engines using style guides. A DITA Open Toolkit plugin which uploads generated content to a vector store to be used by an AI Assistant. Apply AI checks to preprocessed DITA XML content. Preprocessing content using AI The presentation will also give us the possibility to look into how DITA-OT plugins are built.	Radu Coravu
14:50 - 15:10	Automating Compliance Verification for Documentation Standards Using AI Ensuring that technical documentation adheres to industry standards, such as IEC 60335, can be a daunting task given the extensive and detailed nature of these standards. This presentation explores an innovative approach to automate the compliance verification process using AI agents. We will discuss a use case where documentation is expanded into a map format, and AI agents are employed to classify and verify each topic against the required standards.	Alex Jitianu
15:10-15:30	Sandboxing the DITA OT Assuming you have a DITA OT-based publishing engine running on a server which is used to publish content uploaded from external locations, let's consider an evil attacker gains access to the publishing system, how could the attacker benefit from having publishing access to the DITA OT and how can we prohibit this? Producing out of memory errors in the DITA OT engine. Making the DITA OT process block in a consuming CPU operation. Obtaining confidential server side information by using the DITA OT. What would it take to run the attacker's code through the DITA OT on the server side. We'll talk about how various vulnerabilities in the XML parser used by the DITA OT could be exploited and even how DITA XML features like coderef expansion can be used to read content from outside of the DITA OT folder.	Radu Coravu
15:30 - 16:00	Coffee break
16:00 - 16:20	Single Source Publishing? Bury the Hatchet with DITA-OT Our team has been leveraging DITA-OT for quite some time, and it has become an invaluable tool in our single-source publishing workflow. With DITA-OT, we’ve been able to effectively organize, reuse, maintain, and edit single-source content, enabling us to produce multiple documents while maintaining consistency across them all. In this session, we’re excited to share our journey and demonstrate how DITA-OT has transformed our content creation process. Join us to learn from our experiences and discover insights that might benefit your own workflows!	Snehal Borole, Ritu Saxena
16:20 - 17:30	Future Plans	DITA OT Day team