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DITA for Enterprise Business Documents

Posted on December 10, 2007
Category Talk DITA to me | 1 Comment

The DITA for Enterprise Business Documents subcommittee of OASIS launched last week. The committee is co-chaired by myself and Michael Boses of In.vision Research. Our first meeting was well attended and there was a lot of enthusiasm. I’ve been talking about this use of DITA for years and now, finally, there are a lot of “keeners” interested in making it happen.

DITA is rapidly becoming well established in Technical Documentation with many groups adopting it or considering the adoption of DITA. However, many other areas in the organization are looking at the use of structured content to improve consistency, publish to multiple channels, and make it possible to manage content in the same way as they manage data. For the most part these organizations have created custom DTDs or schemas, but now they are beginning to focus on DITA as a possibility. The reasons for the focus on DITA include:

• XML standard
• Designed to support web, not just print
• Designed for reuse

Some of these implementations have been very successful using DITA out-of-the-box, others have specialized it, but others have been stopped in their tracks, feeling DITA would not meet their needs.

There are three types of business documents:

• Transactional Business Documents

Includes data oriented documents such as Purchase Orders, Bills of Lading, Drug Form Listings, etc.

• Correspondent Business Documents

Includes short documents that support a business process and usually augment other documents. Examples include Memos, Faxes, Letters, emails, etc.

• Narrative Business Documents

These consist of longer, often multi-section documents that may contain mixed content types. Examples include various types of Study Reports, Contracts, RFP Responses, etc.

We are focusing on narrative business documents. Even with a narrower focus we realize that there are literally thousands, if not thousands and thousands of different types of business documents. Our first tasks are to:

• Identify relevant business process use cases to determine where a structured content/DITA solution might fit.
• Identify potential documents
• Create use cases for sample documents

From there we hope to create a meta-model for a narrative document. A meta-model is like a generic model that can be used as the basis for the actual DITA modeling work. This means that we will analyze documents and try to define the underlying structure. This seems like an impossible task when you think of all the different types of business documents, but it isn’t really. Let’s take existing DITA for a moment, when analyzing all the different types of technical documentation whether it was for software, hardware, boats, medical devices. You begin to see repeated structures over and over again as you look at the information. This is how the generic task, concept, and reference topics were identified. The content is different, but the structure is the same. We anticipate that there will also be common structures in the business documents.

Once the meta-model is in place we will propose changes to the DITA standard, identify how DITA maps can work in this context and, long-term, provide best practice guidelines for using DITA for enterprise business documents.

We have our work cut out for us, but we are looking forward to the challenge.

For more information see the OASIS home page for DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee.

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