This 5-minute Flash-based tutorial introduces DITA Topics, Specializations for Concept, Task, and Reference, and shows how Topics are organized with DITA Maps for publishing to multiple formats.

View the tutorial here. 

For your convenience, below are the eight slides used in the animated and narrated tutorial. If you want higher-quality images to use in a DITA presentation, please contact Bob Doyle.

The short description is an optional element in DITA, but it has powerful usability implications. Carefully-written short descriptions can help readers more successfully navigate information and locate topics that answer their questions. In addition, the act of crafting careful short descriptions can help writers clarify their understanding of the technical content. This session will cover how the content of the <shortdesc> element is displayed in various forms of output, such as PDF, Eclipse-based help, and Microsoft

Building DITA Content With the DITA Open Toolkit. Presented at the DITA 2007 conference by Guanjun Cai of IBM.

QuickTime movie of Creating Task-based Navigation with DITA, presented by Michael Priestley of IBM. Includes a "live" demonstration of Task Modeler.

Presentation at the 22 October 2008 meeting of the RTP DITA Users' Group by Colleen Smith, Content Management Information Architect at Teradata Corporation.

After completing a successful pilot project using DITA and a CMS, Teradata's Information Engineering group is partnering with Teradata Customer Services to share and reuse tech pubs content for creating custom system change documents for field engineers. Challenges in this project include:

Presentation by John Hunt at XPubs 2008.

DITA is an OASIS standard for designing, authoring, and publishing modular information. Its extensible architecture makes large content sets much more manageable and customizable. (say something on topics, maps, metadata)

DITA and Eclipse: A Powerful Combination. Presented at the DITA 2007 conference by Guanjun Cai, Carolyn Henry, and Jennifer Fell of IBM.

Presentation by Peter Li at XPubs 2008.

reating training materials and classes is always a difficult task for any company.  PTC is no exception.  We needed a way to streamline our development and delivery model to ensure that as many people as possible were getting the training they needed in the format that worked best for their learning style.

Michael Priestley, one of IBM's DITA Architects, provides an introduction to DITA, followed by an introduction to some authoring best practices with DITA, and finishing with an end-to-end example of task-based information architecture using DITA maps.

DITA Open Toolkit Debugging and Reporting Tools. Presented at the DITA 2007 conference by Dick Johnson of VR Communications, Inc.