Live From DITA 2006

Today I am reporting from the IBM campus in Raleigh, NC during Day Zero of the DITA 2006 Conference. I’m attending the Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture workshop, taught by IBM DITA guru Michael Priestley. This full day workshop is jam-packed (standing room only) with technical writers and documentation managers from around the globe.

Priestley started the workshop with a brief history of DITA, outlining the markup languages that have come before DITA, and the goals and vision set forth by IBM to handle the hundreds of thousands of topics that IBMers need to manage and deliver in over 50 languages. Priestley pointed out that over 50% of IBM is now creating and publishing content to the web using DITA. Outside of IBM, Priestley says there are many organizartions using DITA for both online and print-based projects.

“Topic-oriented authoring was developed for print,” Priestley told attendees. “It just happens to work well in the online world.”

“So much of what we do at IBM is based on collaboration. If everyone we work with creates content using different proprietary formats, or they use the wrong formats, we cannot pull in the content selectively and repurpose and reuse it quickly and efficiently,” Priestley says. “If everyone agrees to work within the DITA architecture, we can reuse, repurpose, and share content between one another.”

To get started, Priestley said, “First, you need to know what your users need, what your information architecture is…and all of this comes from performing a content analysis and developing an information model that will address your customers’ information needs.”

More to come…