XML@Boeing 2006 — XML for Boeing in the 21st Century

SOA, Web 2.0, S1000D, eBusiness, DITA—XML now travels under many names and its impact continues to spread across the technology landscape. The changes can be seen everywhere—in the adoption of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as a mechanism for evolving enterprise technology infrastructures, in the emergence of new reuse-oriented information standards (DITA and S1000D), and in the rapid growth in popularity of online collaboration venues enabled by Web 2.0. For Boeing, these technological changes are important to follow closely. But what is really important is to recognize and leverage the new modes of doing business that XML is making possible. It will be these new business models that can assist Boeing as it continues to set the pace of aerospace innovation for the remainder of the 21st century. This conference has assembled leading innovators in the XML industry and key voices from within Boeing to discuss what XML, in all these new forms, will mean to Boeing as it moves forward.

Conference Program

Conference Description

This event offers a chance for attendees to learn about the latest developments in XML from some of the very people who are leading these changes. Topics that will be covered in detail include the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) as a new model for facilitating and sustaining high quality information reuse, S1000D the emerging global standard for aerospace technical documentation, and how XML and these emerging standards are changing approaches to content management and, more important for Boeing, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The event will also direct attention towards some of the larger trends, including the broad adoption of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the continued evolution of global eBusiness as facilitated by XML, and the pervasive impact of the cluster of interactive capabilities known as Web 2.0. And all of these topics will be set against the larger context of how XML has evolved since its first appearance, as an initiative, ten years ago and where it will likely go in the future.

Presentation Abstract

Aviation Information Services—Strategies and Solutions for the 21st Century
Dennis Floyd (Boeing)
This keynote address places "XML at Boeing" in a business and strategic context. Dennis Floyd, director of our Aviation Information Services business, describes solutions his team offers to create value for Commercial Aviation Services customers. He presents the "Big Picture" of how information-based developments align with and enable key business objectives and strategic initiatives.

Entering the Second Decade of XML
Sharon Adler (IBM)
As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of XML it is time to reflect and review the accomplishments, risks, opportunities and the technical context in which it functions. With these ideas firmly in mind we can then look to the next decade to understand some of the challenges facing us and where the emphasis should be placed to ensure the continued widespread adoption of XML. The talk will cover the environmental factors around XML and other formats as we consider both web applications and the larger enterprise usage.

Supporting the Entire Technical Data Life Cycle with S1000D
Ryan Augsburger (CDG)
Large complex hardware systems with a long lifespan, such as aircraft, require a huge investment in technical data. Of prime importance to the customer is correct maintenance of the product, which requires strong configuration management of both the product and the technical data. Of prime importance to the manufacturer is maintainability of the data to ensure the correct data is delivered at a reasonable cost. These two issues are central to S1000D which addresses the entire life-cycle of data: planning, status reporting, delivery, feedback, and update. This presentation will address the history and current status of S1000D, core philosophy of data modules, the fundamental technical concepts, and future plans. The overall theme of the session will be to address four questions: 1) What is S1000D good for? 2) What is it not good for? 3) What is the benefit to Boeing? 4) How does it compare with other specs, such as Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)?

Working with Structured Content in DITA XML
Erik Hennum (IBM)
This talk summarizes the use of basic DITA, as well as the extension of DITA for new purposes. Out of the box, DITA provides a solution for structured content by assembling topics for a document or website. Adopters can use the DITA Open Toolkit to generate HTML, PDF, and other outputs. The bundled topic vocabularies reflect the accepted best practices for technical communications. To enable repurposing of topics, DITA maps manage relationships outside of the topics. Through specialization, DITA can be extended with new vocabularies for new kinds of structured information. At the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standards body, subcommittees are introducing vocabularies for training and for the machine industry. Outside of the standards activities, DITA adopters are specializing vocabularies for medical, legal, and accounting information, as well as extending DITA for the specific requirements of their organizations. Through the addition of data and foreign specialization, DITA 1.1 promises to enable new kinds of extensions.

Web 2.0 and the New Collaboration Paradigm
Joe Gollner (Stilo)
The enterprise of today is a dynamic assembly of people and organizations. To be effective, a complex enterprise such as Boeing must be able to facilitate interactions among people and organizations so that the knowledge that is distributed across the community can form a coherent basis for coordinated action. These interactions occur between the enterprise and its customers, bi-directionally throughout the supply chain network, and among teams formed around specialized topics. On a more interpersonal level, interactions are needed inside multidisciplinary integration teams, within communities of practice, and among informal networks of people who collaborate to resolve problems daily. Ideally a single framework and infrastructure could be put into place that could support all of these forms of interaction. Extending a trend that is evident in the progressive evolution of structured markup standards, a new collaboration paradigm has emerged under the abstract rubric of Web 2.0. This rubric can be used to address all of the types of interaction that are required at each of the levels to constitute and direct a fractal enterprise.

The Increasing Value of Content Management in PLM and How XML Standards—S1000D and DITA—Are Driving Requirements
Dave White (PTC)
To develop products more quickly and service them more effectively, leading companies want to eliminate islands of information and connect their marketing, sales, product development, manufacturing, and service/support functions. Companies are starting to demand that their PLM systems deliver advanced content management capabilities. They want to make sure that information flows quickly and accurately, with maximum automation and minimum manual intervention, so they can produce high-quality manufacturing instructions, marketing datasheets, parts catalogs, operating guides, and service/maintenance manuals. Not only must the documentation be available on time, it must also meet customers' increasing expectations for accuracy, timeliness and relevance. To streamline the documentation process, we must apply the same concepts that streamline product development: Enable the associative reuse of existing information, eliminate redundancy, and use automation to reduce manual effort. XML enables document components to be created as reusable modules and automatically assembled and published to a wide variety of media. Several standards, including S1000D and DITA, now exist to provide a common format for interchanging product information, both inside and outside the organization. PLM must adopt these standards so customers can fully benefit from a seamless publishing system that reduces errors, shortens cycles, and reduces manual effort.

The Bermuda Triangle of Component Content Management
Jeroen van Rotterdam (X-Hive)
Reducing redundancy by reusing content in structured documentation seems a logical choice, but in practice this turns out to be a challenge for content management systems, which need to solve the "Bermuda Triangle of Content Management": linking, versioning and configuration management.

S1000D Process Data Module, Use Cases
Jeroen van Rotterdam (X-Hive)
An introduction to, and use cases for, the S1000D Process Data Module.

UBL: What XML Was Made For
Jon Bosak (Sun)
Universal Business Language (UBL) increases interoperability in electronic commerce by standardizing generic business messages. The UBL 1.0 Standard, released in November 2004, includes an XML library of standard data components and a set of basic business schemas (purchase order, invoice, shipping notice, and so on) together with a wealth of supporting materials to aid the implementer. UBL 2.0, expected to become an OASIS Standard in December 2006, incorporates input from governments and tax authorities to provide a complete XML solution for electronic procurement. In addition to its likely role as the standard for B2B ecommerce, UBL demonstrates the basic purpose of XML—to provide a framework for interoperability.

An Introduction to the OASIS Reference Model for SOA
Duane Nickull (Adobe)
This session introduces the OASIS Reference Model for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It defines a model for SOA abstract of any specific implementation and discusses how architects and software IT specialists can use it in their fields. The Reference Model is an architecture that focuses on services as the action boundary between capabilities and entities that consume those capabilities. The model explores primarily architectural issues but also discusses business alignment when relevant. The session will also include a brief example on how a platform can be built using the reference model as a guide to ensure the consistent alignment to SOA tenets and axioms with the platform.

About the Speakers

Scott Tsao, Computing Systems Architect in Boeing Information Technology, started his Boeing career in 1979. As the initiator of XML@Large, the Boeing XML community of practice with membership around 900, Scott has been spearheading and facilitating technical leadership and support for the education, training, and implementation of XML technologies since 1999. Scott is currently a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Schema Working Group, as well as the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.

Dave Blue, Chief Information Architect for The Boeing Company, is responsible for developing and communicating the vision, strategy, and architecture supporting information management disciplines and applying this architecture to projects. As a member of the Chief Architects Council (CAC), he is responsible for ensuring that information architecture is integrated within the overall enterprise architecture. Dave’s Boeing career has been in Information Technology with progressively broader responsibilities in application development and maintenance, information management, and architecture disciplines.

Dennis Floyd, Director of Aviation Information Services in the Technical Services organization of Commercial Aviation Services, is responsible for Airplane Health Management, Electronic Flight Bag, Electronic Log Book, Maintenance Performance Toolbox, and more. Dennis has worked in strategy, business development, sales, marketing, process design, engineering, test, and leadership roles in both BCA and IDS. He earned a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kansas State University and a master’s degree in Systems Management from the University of Southern California.

Sharon Adler, Senior Manager at IBM Research, specializes in XML standards and Web Services. Before she rejoined IBM in 1999, she was Director of Product Management for Publishing Tools for Inso Corporation. From 1985 to 1992, Sharon held several key positions with IBM Corporation. She has been instrumental in the development of international computer standards for more than 20 years. She currently serves as Chair of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Working Group in the W3C.

Ryan Augsburger, Senior Principle Engineer of Continental DataGraphics (CDG), has been with Boeing and CDG for 20 years. He has worked in technical publications since 1994 and has specialized in Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs). He first became involved with S1000D in 2000 and is the chair elect of the S1000D Electronic Publications Working Group (EPWG), the technical branch of S1000D.

Erik Hennum, Information Architect at IBM, is a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. For IBM and Informix, he has worked on design and processing of XML and SGML representations of document content and on Resource Description Framework (RDF) representations of subject classifications.

Joe Gollner, Vice President Enterprise Solutions for Stilo International, leads an interdisciplinary team in designing, developing and deploying advanced content processing solutions. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has designed and implemented hundreds of solutions featuring the use of open markup standards to address industry requirements. As the former chair of XML World, he has been a consistent advocate of the role that XML can play in improving the management of enterprise technology investments.

Dave White, Vice President of Product Strategy at PTC, is responsible for strategic product vision and product management coordination across PTC products. Before joining PTC, he was the VP of Technology at Arbortext, where he worked for 12 years.

Jeroen van Rotterdam, CEO X-Hive Corporation, holds a Master's Degree in Management & Computer Science from Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from HTS (Rotterdam, the Netherlands). In January 1996, van Rotterdam co-founded X-Hive Corporation with former Erasmus classmates, Irsan Widarto and Michiel Veen.

Jon Bosak, Distinguished Engineer of Sun Microsystems, organized and led the working group that created XML. He served as the W3C XML Coordination Group Chair, and on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML), a joint project of OASIS and United Nations Centre for Facilitation of Commerce and Trade (UN/CEFACT). Jon is current chair of the OASIS UBL Technical Committee. Articles by Jon Bosak can be found on his web page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/

Duane Nickull, Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe Systems, chairs the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model (SOA-RM) Technical Committee, which recently delivered its first Committee Specification. Duane served as Vice Chair of the UN/CEFACT and as liaison among the W3C, UN, and OASIS standards consortiums. He participated in writing the W3C Web Services Architecture, and on Web Services Security.


For further information about this conference, please contact Scott Tsao.