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September 2006
Vol. 14, No. 3

So, What About DITA and Information Mapping?

by Doug Gorman, President and CEO

We are seeing more and more articles and inquiries regarding Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA is an XML-based Open Source standard architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering content. A large group of well-known companies, led by IBM are backing the DITA standard. Organizations are implementing DITA in order to improve the effectiveness of single source publishing or publishing to multiple media.

DITA supports the concept that information should be created in chunks, called topics (a.k.a. Information Maps), and that the topics can have properties (a.k.a. key blocks). The primary topic types are task, concept, and reference. At this level, the implementation of DITA can be quite straight-forward, but DITA also includes the idea of domain or industry specializations. These specializations are a worthy concept, but implementation can get very complex. This complexity has often required a technical layer to be added to organizations that are implementing DITA.

The good news here is that DITA and Information Mapping share a lot of the same concepts. As someone trained in Information Mapping, you already have the skills necessary to create DITA topics - and more! If you get involved in your organization's DITA implementation we would suggest that you

  • encourage your organization to keep the implementation of DITA at a very high-level for the bulk of contributing authors. Keep it simple and try to implement the standard as it is.
  • focus the technical staff on specialization, if specialization is a must.
  • ask that you be able to continue to author in Microsoft Word with a product like Content Mapper, rather than adopting complex and hard to use XML editors.
  • relax, because you are already well-grounded in the foundations of topic-based authoring.
  • consider using your Information Mapping skills to create concept topics that are actually process, concept, principle and structure Information Maps.

As DITA attempts to become a ubiquitous standard, Information Mapping's training, consulting, and software tools are keeping pace with your organization's evolving needs. We would be pleased to hear from you regarding your DITA implementation issues and our services and software will help you get the most from DITA.

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