The DITA OASIS Standard builds content reuse into the authoring process, defining an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing many kinds of information in print and on the Web.
The standard is advanced through an open process by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, a group that encourages new participation from developers and users.
The DITA OASIS Standard defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing technical documentation in print and on the Web. DITA (commonly pronunced dit'-uh) builds content reuse into the authoring process for document creation and management.
Topic-Based Authoring
Focusing on a common topic model as a conceptual unit of authoring, DITA provides a core set of topic types derived from concept, task, and reference. DITA defines a specialization mechanism for extending markup to represent either new topic types or new domains of markup common across sets of topic types. DITA maps can combine topics into various kinds of deliverables. Content can be shared among maps or topics. Class-based processing ensures new specializations can be supported with existing tools, speeding the testing and adoption of new designs.
With DITA, all content is inherently reusable. That's because DITA's strength lies in a unified content reuse mechanism that enables an element to replace itself with the content of a like element, either in the current topic or in a separate topic that shares the same content models.
Supporting Multiple Deliverables and Publishing Channels
DITA enables organizations to deliver content as closely as possible to the point-of-use, making it ideal for applications such as integrated help systems, web sites, and how-to instruction pages. DITA's topic-oriented content can be used to exploit new features or delivery channels as they become available.
DITA enables highly automatable processes, consistent authoring, and enhanced applicability to specific industries. Content owners benefit from industry support, interoperability, and reuse of community contributions. At the same time, content owners address the specific needs of their business or industry.
Benefits
DITA can be used to...
Get Involved
DITA is advanced by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. Its members include representatives of:
...and other XML tools vendors, consultants on Information Architecture and Content Management Systems (CMS), and users.
Participation remains open to all organizations and individuals. A wide variety of membership levels and rates are offered to ensure all those who are affected by DITA have a voice in its development. See Join OASIS or contact member.services@oasis-open.org for details.
For some, perhaps the real question is Why XML? (or What is XML?), but assuming you have answered those questions (and are using XML), then the next step is to locate an appropriate data model for your content. This is an important step because you will spend a lot of time and money developing processes and selecting tools to support your chosen data model. XML, by definition, is extensible and allows you to create any valid structure that suits your needs, but before you decide to develop your own, consider the pre-existing options (see Don't Invent XML Languages for a discussion on why not to develop your own). If you can leverage and build on top of someone else's work, why not?
DITA is a data model for authoring and publishing topic-based content. It was developed by IBM for internal use and has since been released to the open-source community (now under the guidance of OASIS). This architecture and data model were designed by a cross-company workgroup representing user assistance teams working throughout IBM. After an initial investigation in late 1999, the workgroup developed the architecture collaboratively during 2000 through postings to a database and weekly teleconferences. Since that time IBM has migrated thousands of pages of content to DITA.
But, why DITA?
Well, assuming your content fits into the topic-based data model, DITA's increasing popularity means that more and more authoring and publishing tools will be developed to support that model. The DITA Open Toolkit allows you to generate many popular output formats (HTML, HTML Help, PDF, Java Help, etc.) from DITA-based content. If you develop your own data model, you'll have to pay to develop those transformations. DITA's modular architecture, supports efficient reuse of content at the word, phrase or topic level. DITA also has the concept of "specialization," which allows you to develop elements of your own that are based on core DITA elements. This helps you to customize DITA to support your particular types of content while continuing to take advantage of the base DITA tools and transformations.
Learn more
The following articles provide additional information: