Darwin Information Typing Architecture

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an OASIS

OASIS (organization)

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards...

standard XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

data model for authoring and publishing. Many third party tools support authoring, including Adobe

Adobe

Adobe is a natural building material made from sand, clay, water, and some kind of fibrous or organic material , which the builders shape into bricks using frames and dry in the sun. Adobe buildings are similar to cob and mudbrick buildings. Adobe structures are extremely durable, and account for...

FrameMaker

Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor for the production and manipulation of large structured documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems. Although FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years, it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.- Overview :FrameMaker has more...

, XMetaL

XMetaL

XMetaL, or XMetaL Author, is a software application used for creating and editing documents in XML and SGML. It has some features common to word processors, but is a native XML editor that can be configured to work with various standard and custom DTDs and XML Schema...

, Arbortext, Quark XML Author

Quark XML Author

Quark XML Author is a computer program for XML editing. It is an add-in to Microsoft Word. The program's main focus is on allowing users with no knowledge of XML to create XML documents....

, Oxygen XML Editor

Oxygen XML Editor

The Oxygen XML Editor is a multi-platform XML editor, XSLT/XQuery debugger and profiler with Unicode support. It is a Java application, so it can run in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It also has a version that can run as an Eclipse plugin.- XML editing features :Oxygen XML offers a number of...

, easyDITA

EasyDITA

easyDITA is a software application that provides a complete DITA Documentation solution for Information Developers who are working in Component-based systems, or "Topic-based authoring", using the DITA XML format. easyDITA is usually delivered in a SaaS mode, but is also deployed to servers on...

, and SDL Xopus. With the DITA Open Toolkit

DITA Open Toolkit

The DITA Open Toolkit, or dita-ot, is an open-source publishing system for publishing DITA content to multiple formats. It was developed by IBM, and released as a public standard in 2001, along with DITA.The dita-ot reference implementation uses Ant and Java....

publishing system, DITA features single source publishing

Single source publishing

Single source publishing, also known as single sourcing, allows the same content to be used in different documents or in various formats. The labour-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on one document. Further transformations are carried out mechanistically, by...

, inheritance

Inheritance

Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts, rights and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies...

, topic-based authoring

Topic-based authoring

Topic-based authoring is a modular content creation approach that supports XML content reuse, content management, and makes the dynamic assembly of personalized information possible....

, and content reuse

Reuse

To reuse is to use an item more than once. This includes conventional reuse where the item is used again for the same function, and new-life reuse where it is used for a different function. In contrast, recycling is the breaking down of the used item into raw materials which are used to make new...

Topic orientation

DITA content is created as small topic items, rather than long books or chapters. A DITA map contains links to topics, organized in the sequence (which may be hierarchical) in which they are intended to appear in finished documents. A DITA map defines the table of contents for deliverables. Relationship tables in DITA maps can also specify which topics link to each other.

Modular topics can be reused in different deliverables. However, the strict topic-orientation of DITA makes it an awkward fit for content that contains lengthy narratives that do not lend themselves to being broken into small, standalone chunks. Experts stress the importance of content analysis

Content analysis

Content analysis or textual analysis is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws."According to Dr...

in the early stages of implementing structured authoring.

Content references

Fragments of content within topics (or less commonly, the topics themselves) can be reused through the use of content references (conref), a transclusion

Transclusion

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...

mechanism.

Conditional text

Conditional text is content within a document that is meant to appear in some renditions of the document, but not other renditions.For example, a writer can produce Macintosh and Windows versions of the same software manual by marking Macintosh-specific content as "Macintosh only" and...

allows filtering or styling content based on attributes for audience, platform, product, and other properties.

Metadata

DITA includes extensive metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

elements and attributes, which make topics easier to find.

Information typing

DITA specifies three basic topic types: Task, Concept and Reference. Each of the three basic topic types is a specialization of a generic Topic type, which contains a title element, a prolog element for metadata, and a body element. The body element contains paragraph, table, and list elements, similar to HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

A Task topic is intended for a procedure that describes how to accomplish a task. A Task topic lists a series of steps that users follow to produce an intended outcome. The steps are contained in a taskbody element, which is a specialization of the generic body element. The steps element is a specialization of an ordered list element.
Concept information is more objective, containing definitions, rules, and guidelines.
A Reference topic is for topics that describe command syntax, programming instructions, and other reference material, and usually contains detailed, factual material.

Specialization

DITA allows adding new elements and attributes through specialization of base DITA elements and attributes. Through specialization, DITA can accommodate new topic types, element types, and attributes as needed for specific industries or companies. Specializations of DITA for specific industries, such as the semiconductor

Semiconductor

A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...

industry, are standardized through OASIS

OASIS (organization)

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards...

technical committees or subcommittees. A significant percentage of organizations using DITA also develop their own specializations.

The extensibility of DITA permits organizations to specialize DITA by defining specific information structures and still use standard tools to work with them. The ability to define company-specific information architectures enables companies to use DITA to enrich content with metadata that is meaningful to them, and to enforce company-specific rules on document structure.

Compatibility with non-DITA content

The element types and structures in DITA topics are similar to popular languages such as HTML. For example, a bulleted or numbered list can be copied and pasted directly from HTML to DITA.

DITA maps can include both DITA topics and non-DITA documents (such as HTML files and Microsoft Word documents) in document hierarchies. However, processors are generally limited in their ability to merge DITA and non-DITA content into consolidated printed documents.

Creating content in DITA

DITA map and topic documents are XML

XML

files. As with HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, any images, video files, or other files that must appear in output are inserted via reference. Any XML editor

XML editor

An XML editor is a markup language editor with added functionality to facilitate the editing of XML. This can be done using a plain text editor, with all the code visible, but XML editors have added facilities like tag completion and menus and buttons for tasks that are common in XML editing, based...

can therefore be used to write DITA content, with the exception of editors that support only a limited set of XML schemas (such as XHTML

XHTML

XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

editors). Various editing tools have been developed that provide specific features to support DITA, such as visualization of conrefs.

Publishing content written in DITA

DITA is conceived as an end-to-end architecture. In addition to indicating what elements, attributes, and rules are part of the DITA language, the DITA specification includes rules for publishing DITA content in print, HTML, online Help, and other formats.

For example, the DITA specification indicates that if the conref attribute of element A contains a path to element B, the contents of element B will display in the location of element A. DITA-compliant publishing solutions, known as DITA processors, must handle the conref attribute according to the specified behaviour. Rules also exist for processing other rich features such as conditional text

Conditional text

, index markers, and topic-to-topic links. Applications that transform DITA content into other formats, and meet the DITA specification's requirements for interpreting DITA markup, are known as DITA processors.

Origin and name

Specialization (a form of inheritance

Inheritance (computer science)

In object-oriented programming , inheritance is a way to reuse code of existing objects, establish a subtype from an existing object, or both, depending upon programming language support...

) in Darwin Information Typing Architecture is in some ways analogous to the naturalist Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

's concept of evolutionary adaptation.

March 2001 Introduction by IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

of the core DTD
Document Type Definition
Document Type Definition is a set of markup declarations that define a document type for SGML-family markup languages...

and XML Schema
May 2002 Domain specialization added to topic specialization
April 2004 OASIS Technical Committee for DITA formed
February 2005 SourceForge begins DITA Open Toolkit support
June 2005 DITA v1.0 approved as an OASIS standard
August 2005 DITA Open Toolkit v1.1 is released
March 2006 OASIS launches DITA.XML.org
August 2007 DITA V1.1 is approved by OASIS, including Bookmap specialization
December 2010 DITA V1.2 is approved by OASIS, includes:
Indirect linking with keys
New content reuse features
Enhanced glossary support, including acronyms
New industry specializations (Training, Machinery)
New support for controlled values / taxonomies (Subject Scheme specialization)

External links

DITA XML.org community site
DITA World — Comprehensive list of DITA resources: articles, vendors, user groups and more
DITA Open Toolkit User Guide and Reference
Roadmap for DITA Development, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
DITA News - aggregates DITA bloggers, has extensive resources, and DITA tools listing
RuDI: Ruby Utilities for DITA processing
DITAToo - DITA-based content sharing tool

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Topic orientation

Content references

Conditional text

Metadata

Information typing

Specialization

Compatibility with non-DITA content

Creating content in DITA

Publishing content written in DITA

Origin and name

See also

External links