The DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard was pioneered at IBM and is sponsored by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. OASIS defines DITA as “an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways.” To obtain more information on OASIS and DITA, refer to the DITA XML.org web site at dita.xml.org.

Arbortext Editor supports the DITA standard and provides a sophisticated, flexible environment for authoring and publishing DITA documents. Arbortext Editor has customized configurations for editing both DITA topics and DITA maps. DITA maps are covered in the next part of this tutorial. Maps enable you to organize references to DITA topics and other resources.

Authoring a DITA topic is similar to working with other types of XML documents. A DITA topic is intended to be a modular document that provides discrete information about a single subject. There are four primary types of DITA topics:

The Arbortext Editor configuration for editing DITA topics is similar to the standard configuration for editing other types of XML documents. Arbortext Editor also provides a tool called the Resource Manager that assists you with locating content to include in your DITA topics.

This part of the Tutorial introduces you to some basic DITA topic concepts and provides more step-by-step exercises to help you become familiar with the support for DITA documents.

For more information, refer to the DITA Authoring Overview and Authoring DITA Topics topics in the Arbortext Editor help.