DITA v1.1 Draft Unleashed Into the Wild

By Angela Natividad | Published Mar 8, 2007

The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture — known as DITA — Technical Committee has released version 1.1 of its draft specification for public review, an ideally useful period of user critique that will last until May 4th.

Used for authoring, producing and conveying information as discrete, typed topics, DITA gets a tune-up in v1.1 with architectural specs, a language specification, a set of DTD's and equivalent schemas.

DITA is an XML-based ECM solution, best utilized for tailoring highly specific forms of information management:

Specialization: Enabling the creation of fresh types that inherit processing rules from old types, much like the pattern process that occurs in wikis.
Topic-oriented authoring, which promotes the creation of information sets on a single subject. These subjects can be placed in any order within books (imagine being able to shuffle your chapters around), or can be assembled into help or FAQ systems.
Information typing, which enables users to ID a type of topic, like a reference or task.

OASIS, which played a major role in helping define ECM standards, notes that DITA demonstrates its indispensability with its ability to manage readable information and reuse it in many different iterations.

DITA also helps make online systems like User Assistance (a help key) or web resource, and can create minimalist books for easy authoring. DITA's language reference also describes what comprises DTD and its information-typed offspring: reference, concept, task and glossentry. All in all, it proves a handy unit for organizing topic-oriented or otherwise-denoted units of data or text.

Of note, DITA was recently selected as Workday's choice for documentation schema and CMS Watch and The Rockley Group have joined forces to develop a report on Component Content Management Systems.

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