DITA

DITA or the OASIS Open Darwin Information Typing Architecture is a standard XML-based architecture for representing documents intended primarily for consumption by humans. The DITA specification defines a set of standard document types for authoring and organizing documents using topic-oriented information and a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types.

DITA's architecture is driven by two overarching requirements:

  • Enable interchange and interoperation of content from a wide variety of sources without requiring everyone involved to agree on one single standard document type definition.
  • Enable reuse of content among different publications and/or within the same publication.
DITA is not a single document type or application. Rather, DITA it is a framework and set of building blocks by which specific applications can be built while ensuring interoperation and interchange among all conforming DITA content sets and all conforming general-purpose DITA processors.

Effectively, DITA is an enterprise quality content management system (CMS) or more precisely a component content management system (CCMS). This 55 minute video, DITA CCMS: What is it? Why do you need one? How to pick the right one., helps you understand what DITA is and why you might need it.

The difference between a CMS and a CCMS is that a CMS manages content at the document or page level only whereas a CCMS manages content at a more granular level.

In DITA, a component can be a word, a phrase, a paragraph, a topic, or an arbitrary "chunk" of a document such as an entire chapter.  DITA treats these components as "blocks".  The component blocks can be combined in order to create what you need without having to create multiple versions of the same information and then having to maintain those multiple versions.  In DITA you have one version and DITA provides the capabilities to reuse and maintain that information.


This short 3 minute video, easyDITA Explained, explains the concept of "atomization". This video, What is Structured Content?, explains the notion of structured content and why it is important. This video, What is a Single Source of Truth?, explains the process of normalization and why having a single source of the truth is important to managing your information.

Heretto (which used to be called easyDITA) seems to be one of the leaders in CCMS systems.

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