I’d like to emphasize that successful retrieval of content is going to be a combination of a well planned retrieval metadata strategy and a flexibile and robust query tool. Optimally, you would like to have a query designer. One that would let you create queries like: Find all the paragraphs whose audience is set to “engineering”. Find all the paragraphs in a Task Result whose audience is set to “engineering”. Find all the paragraphs in a Task Result whose audience is set to “engineering” and return the results as a list of topics. Find all the paragraphs in a Task Result whose audience is set to “engineering” and return the results as a map of topics. Findability will come from having both good metadata and a good query tool.

When is a technical writer like a database administrator? When their content is in XML.

Mark Lewis
“DITA Metrics”