Darwin Information Typing Architecture

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture or Document Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML data model for authoring and publishing. It is an open standard that is defined and maintained by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.

The name derives from the following components:

can be reused across multiple publications. Fragments of content within topics can be reused through the use of content references (conref or conkeyref), a transclusion mechanism.

The latest version of DITA (DITA 1.3) includes five specialized topic types: Task, Concept, Reference, Glossary Entry, and Troubleshooting. Each of these three 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.

A DITA map is a container for topics used to transform a collection of content into a publication. It gives the topics' sequence and structure. A map can include relationship tables (reltables) that define hyperlinks between topics. Maps can be nested. Maps can reference topics or other maps, and can contain a variety of content types and metadata.

DITA includes extensive metadata elements and attributes, both at topic level and within elements.Conditional text allows filtering or styling content based on attributes for audience, platform, product, and other properties. The conditional processing profile (.ditaval file) is used to identify which values are to be used for conditional processing.

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 industry, are standardized through OASIS technical committees or subcommittees. Many 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.

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