Balisage Paper: DITA
Kristen James Eberlein
Eberlein Consulting LLC
Kris is the Chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (TC), where she works to set the future direction, growth, and health of the DITA standard. She has been active with the DITA TC since 2007, and has served in several leadership roles: Secretary (2007-2010), Co-chair (2010-2013), and Chair (2014-present). To finance her standards habit, she is the principal consultant with Eberlein Consulting LLC, where she works with companies to develop, refine, and sustain successful (and practical) DITA implementations. She also is co-editor of the DITA 1.2 and 1.3 specifications. Trained as a historian, she’s worn almost all the content worker hats you can imagine: Information developer, team lead, information architect, tool smith …. When not herding (technical) cats, she cooks, quilts, enjoys the emerging culinary mecca of Durham, NC, and drives her 2002 Mini Cooper a little too fast.
Abstract
DITA, the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is an XML-based specification for modular and extensible topic-based information. DITA is specializable, which allows for the introduction of specific semantics for specific purposes without increasing the size of other DTDs, and which allows the inheritance of shared design and behavior and interchangeability with unspecialized content.