XML DTDs - DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture)

Most of the XML Schemas and DTDs that you encounter in Scholarly and Professional publishing are traditional book-oriented devices. They come from a long tradition, dating back to SGML and ISO-12083 or the AAP DTD. Alternatively, they may use DocBook, a DTD that is designed for handbooks and technical documentation, the National Library of Medicine's excellent NLM-2 DTDs for scientific and technical publications or TEI, the Text Encoding Initiatives' literary DTD.

This type of DTD is not always appropriate in today's environment of granular bits of information, small chunks of data that need to be delivered not only to print, but in mobile applications and point-of-care solutions. What may be needed here is something that is more topically oriented.

DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture is the strong player here. Its forté is with topic-oriented content at any level of granularity – it is highly extensible, and allows you to build documents and information flows on the fly with a unique blend of inclusion of "elements" (often a bit of content) with other similar elements. This is called "transclusion".

In a way – a too abstracted way for XML weenies – one may think of a DITA topic almost as a database record. But unlike keeping information in a database, one gets the advantage of storing structure in the document.

DITA is supported by many organizations, and an excellent public domain tookit is available. Many of the major commercial tools are incorporating special support for DITA. While the details of DITA are beyond the scope of this page, interested users should check out some of the following links to see if DITA might be the right approach for your topically-oriented content.

General Information from Wikipedia
Sourceforge DITA Open Toolkit Project
Robin Cover's DITA Pages

Examples of DITA support on commercial tools:
XMeTaL
XML SPY
Arbortext (PTC)