PureGin.org

I attended a presentation tonight on DITA, hosted by the Society for Technical Communication, Canada West Coast Chapter.

Paul Prescod and Su-Laine Yeo of BlastRadius gave an overview of this XML-based standard/architecture for creating, using, and re-using content, and illustrated how some of the key features, such as topic focus, information typing, composition of documents using maps, customization of document specifications via specialization, and definition of re-usable content/document components can be used within BlastRadius's XMetaL DITA edition software.

Just as object-oriented software design can be regarded as a collection of conventions and tools to support re-use of software components and larger structures, the design of DITA can be regarded as an attempt to bring a 'topic-oriented' approach to the design, implementation, and maintenance of large documents.

If this approach can deliver the same benefits to the task of creating large document systems that object-oriented programming brought to the domain of software systems, we can look forward to great improvements in the ways in which humans and machines interact with information.

However, there are some questions that spring to mind. Is information really amenable to this kind of analysis and synthesis? The idea that software should formalize a model of some part of the real world seems somewhat natural, and most attempts at representation cleave along boundaries which our minds accept with little hesitation. Objects 'in the world' are objects because they are perceptually distinct entities, recognizable in and of themselves and having well-defined boundaries and relationships with other objects (in most cases). Information seems to be a much more slippery quantity, which sometimes seems to require a holistic approach to understanding.