IBM Corporate User Technologies | November 2004 | © 2004 IBM Corporation An Introduction to Darwin Information Typing Architecture: DITA Presented by Dave A Schell Senior Manager, IBM®

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 2 What’s ahead?  History of DITA – Why was DITA developed?  Introduction to DITA – What is DITA?  Benefits of DITA – Why should you care?

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 3 Background: Why DITA?

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 4 Identify the need – Customer issues  Solutions, not products Integration of information  Information glut More meaningful information (role & task based)  Out-of-date information in books Updating and maintaining information  Reduce cost of deployment of information Provide information on-line  Reduce support costs Customize and update information

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 5 Identify need – Historic convergences  Information architecture  Technical writing community focus on Minimalism  W3C development of XML  Trend away from SGML  Recognized need for alternative Shorter development cycles Variability in HTML outputs Componentization of products Need for reuse

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 6 History of markup Alternatives to books Shorter cycles, fewer people versus monolithic DTDs, long learning curves. Need for faster, cheaper. Reuse.

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 7 The Vision (1998/1999)

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 8 Promise and Reality of XML  Promise Separate content from form: reuse content in different presentation media Use specific markup to describe your content Use standard solution to enable easy exchange of information  Reality – Generic XML Generic XML provides an SGML with simpler syntax but similar problems Generic solutions - not specific to needs Knowledge representation is strongly related to current corporate culture  Tradeoff The more useful your markup is to you, the more it will cost you and the fewer people will share the costs

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 9 DITA designed to address trade-offs What is DITA?

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 10 DITA defined  Darwin: DITA utilizes principles of inheritance for specialization  Information Typing: DITA was designed for technical information based on an information architecture of Concept, Task and Reference  Architecture: DITA is a model for extension both of design and of processes

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 11 Core design principles of DITA  Topic orientation Discrete units of information covering a specific subject with a specific intent  Topic granularity Self-contained topics combine with other topics into information sets  Strong typing DTDs and schemas guarantee that DITA types follow identical information structures  Specialization Architecture for extending basic types to new types adapted for a particular use within an information set  Common base class Top-level "generic" base type provides “fallback” for all types

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 12 The core DITA topic types – The “IT” in DITA topic concept task reference Provides background information that users need to know. Provides quick access to facts. Provides procedural details such as step-by-step instructions. A unit of information which is meaningful when it stands alone.

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 13 Topic granularity and reuse of content

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 14 Reuse of content  Reuse flows from the topic-based paradigm  If content is authored as standalone topics Topics can be reused in different contexts Topics from multiple components can be integrated as a solution

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 15 Topics reused in deliverables Topic 1 Topic 4 Topic 2 Topic 3 ƒ Deliverables select topics from a pool ƒ Deliverable 1 uses topics 1 and 4 ƒ Deliverable 2 uses topics 2 and 4 ƒ Neither deliverable uses topic 3

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 16 Working with DITA maps  A DITA map applies context to the topics  Organizes a set of topics in a hierarchy and sequence Different organization for different deliverables — not just different formats for the same content Can reuse the same topic with different collections of topics Can provide multiple views on the same topics: by product, by task, …  Sets properties of the topic at a position within the hierarchy Properties include the title and metadata Change the title relative to the parent topic Metadata can identify a topic as advanced for one deliverable and basic for another Eclipse help JavaHelp HTMLHelp web pages books

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 17

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 18 Value of DITA to content creators  DITA is the foundation for collaboration for developing information. DITA allows IBM product / component families to easily share content. This allows us to build solutions much more than we have every done before and much more quickly. Teams can pull information from across diverse products into a single output.  Teams can manage the integration of information by using DITA maps. DITA maps pull together individual topics into an order. This allows different teams to pull the same topic into different maps and to build a solution map, pulling topics from across components or products. This allows flexibility in combining and recombining information with maps and does not require authors to touch the original topics.  DITA provides authoring consistency. Authoring consistency comes from strong information typing. Information typing also facilitates reuse and integration across product teams.  DITA defines an architecture for extending and specializing its core information types, enabling rapid response to frequent industry changes. DITA enforces business process / architectures. New information types are extended as delta changes from a core type, greatly reducing the time and resource needed for development, testing, and deployment.  DITA supports personalization through a rich set of metadata.  DITA’s DTDs are based on a core set of familiar HTML tags, making it easy to teach others and allowing new authors to get up to speed quickly.

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 19 Value of DITA to customers and users  DITA organizes content into topic-based information units, with each topic describing a single task, concept, or reference item. Because of this focus on topics, customers can: Update and replace single topics of information quickly as needed to support an on- demand environment. Receive increased consistency - a task is a task, a concept is a concept, and so on, and all follow a consistent and agreed-upon structure. Receive a quicker time to value -- the sharp focus on tasks that customers must do quickly brings the emphasis on specific core tasks, not requiring customers to wade through information.  There is an improved quality when information is written in DITA. Authors can use analytic techniques to ensure that the information about new features and functions is complete: each feature/function requires one or more tasks, one or more pieces of conceptual information, one or more pieces of reference information.  Customers can use DITA as a foundation on which to build their information; to also integrate their information with other information. DITA easily supports topic-oriented content for their internal training and education courses.

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 20 Value of DITA to business partners & content integrators  DITA enables a foundation both for interoperability with other DITA adopters and for extensibility to meet the requirements of their industry or organization.  Focused – allows 3 rd parties to specialize with own information Third-parties can easily customize or provide new content with standard tools.  Vendors can quickly integrate information about their products with other vendors’ products. DITA allows additional leverage since the information can also be customized and extended in a consistent, standard, pre-determined data format.  DITA metadata and domain vocabularies can be defined at an industry level, such as telecom, allowing other industries to leverage consistent vocabularies.  Standards-based Define platform for interchange - DITA topic is base with fallback for specialization  Rapid development platform for extending base information Rules for inheritance – allow others to add with small modifications, not rewrite DTD from scratch  Reuse across functions Reuse topics in education / learning environments

IBM Corporate User Technology An Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation Where next?  Learn more about DITA Cover page - Introduction -  Where do we take DITA together? Join the dialog on the DITA forum – news://news.software.ibm.com:119/ibm.software.developerworks.xml.dita  Download the DITA distribution

IBM Corporate User Technologies Introduction to DITA © 2004 IBM Corporation 22 DITA and the Open Community  Making the design open - DITA at OASIS OASIS TC has excellent participation by vendors, consultants, implementers, users DITA at OASIS  Making the code open – DITA Open Toolkit at SourceForge Initially published through IBM developerWorks for mindshare and validation (DITA 1.3) – still available there Open Source – Soon will be a SourceForge community of tools Reference implementation - Will continue to be enhanced as a usable production system Samples and demos of advanced DITA capabilities Specialization and other tools sets OASIS – Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards