Glossary · Foundations
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)
Also known as: Darwin Information Typing Architecture, DITA XML, DITA 1.3
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an OASIS XML standard for creating, managing and publishing topic-based content. Content is authored as typed topics, organized and reused through maps, and extended through specialization. DITA 1.3 is the version approved by OASIS in December 2015.
- DITA
- Standard
In one sentence
DITA is the OASIS XML standard for topic-based authoring: typed topics, maps for assembly and reuse, and specialization to extend the vocabulary.
Example
A manufacturer writes installation, operation and maintenance content as DITA topics once and publishes a printed manual, an online help system and a service portal from the same maps.
Explained in context
Context cards connect this term with others to answer one question. Also in British English and German.
- Minimalism and structured authoringHow do minimalism and structured authoring work together?UKDeutsch
- Six technical documentation models comparedHow do topic-based, task-based, EPPO, semantic, minimalist and structured documentation differ?UKDeutsch
- Four types of SDK comparedWhat distinguishes developer, publishing, platform and hardware SDKs?UKDeutsch
- Stages of a publishing pipelineWhat happens to structured content inside a publishing SDK?UKDeutsch
How it applies
- Technical documentation: DITA is the most widely used XML standard for topic-based authoring. Content is written once as small, typed topics, assembled into deliverables with maps and published to PDF, HTML, help systems and portals from the same source.
- Reuse and variants: Keys, content references and conditional processing let one source serve many products, audiences and output formats without copy-and-paste.
- AI and retrieval: DITA's semantic markup — a step is a
<step>, a hazard is a<hazardstatement>— gives language models structure they can rely on. Topics are natural retrieval chunks, and DITA metadata can be mapped to iiRDS or other RDF vocabularies for delivery.
The name
“Darwin” refers to evolution: new document types are derived from existing ones through specialization and inherit their processing. “Information typing” refers to the principle that each topic has one information type, such as concept, task or reference.
Versions
DITA was developed at IBM and handed to OASIS in 2004. OASIS approved DITA 1.0 in 2005, 1.1 in 2007, 1.2 in 2010 and 1.3 on December 17, 2015; Errata 02, the current corrected text of 1.3, followed on June 19, 2018. This glossary describes DITA 1.3 only.