About Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
Many have wondered what Charles Darwin has to do with XML authoring. The IBM architects of DITA reference Darwinism to bring to the fore that topics can be adapted, or in DITA parlance "specialized", to inherit attributes of basic topics. There are three basic topic types: concepts, tasks and references. As IBM's Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture illustrates, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture defines a set of relationships between the document parts, processors, and communities of users of the information.
The adoption rate of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has been truly remarkable. While its growth stems from and is most apparent across those organizations that publish technical documentation, DITA is certainly not limited to technical publication departments. Because of its specialization feature, DITA is now viewed by a variety of businesses as a stable, low-cost solution to all sorts of documentation from marketing to financial reports to training material and so on. By some estimates, up to 80 percent of new XML publishing implementations will be DITA-based by the middle of 2009.
