What is DITA?

Originally developed by IBM, DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is now an OASIS standard adopted internationally by many industries. It enables us to use standardised structures for information storage, re-purposing and re-use.

It's eminently suitable for documents such as maintenance manuals, specifications, user guides, proposals and much more.
 

The structure for a DITA publication is based on a 'Dita map'. The purpose of the map is to bind a set of references together to form a collection which can be published. The references are usually to individual DITA 'Topics', but they don't necessarily have to be. They can also be to another Dita map, to multimedia segments, SVG files and even PDFs.

 

Standard DITA topics types are:

Task:

• Based on a real-world task or procedure
• Answers "How do I ?" -type questions
• Has well-defined structure that describes how to complete a procedure to accomplish a specific goal

Reference:

• Consists of reference material that describes features of a subject or product:
• Commands in a programming language
• Lists of abbreviations
• Lists of applicable standards

Concept:

• Answers "What is..." -type questions
• Includes a body-level element with a basic topic structure, including sections and examples

Generic:

• Topic with no specific or defined type
• Provides base for other specialized topic types
• Also provides a place to author content that does not belong in existing DITA specialized types

Composite:

• Topic that includes sub-topics

 

Download our white paper on Aerospace and Aviation Information Management (pdf).