XML Content Servers and DITA Are Solving Today’s Content Predicaments

DITA was created for businesses struggling for content repurposing solutions. When it comes to large text book companies for example, they can now target a specific audience of one. Before it was not cost effective or remotely a possibility to create custom text projects to one person from their enormous content base. It was much more profitable to create a huge book including everything to appeal to everyone instead.

Instead of spending money and manpower to create new products for a select group of people, DITA was designed to meet those needs as an architecture for authoring and publishing and managing content for a variety of products for a wide range of audiences.

For example, if a person was trying to find a "how-to" section in an owner's manual about a specific engine part, they may have to spend a long time digging through a lengthy product manual to finally find one part of a technical document that was only one or two pages long. Scanning through pages and pages of technical jargon to finally find a small piece of information is time- consuming and frustrating.

The beauty of pairing DITA with an XML server is the fast search capabilities. The problem of trying to find a small piece of information is solved in just seconds. With DITA, working with an XML-based architecture, a technically rich document can instantly be searched within a company’s content base with millisecond speed search.

The hunt of finding a small piece of information is not so much a hunt anymore as it is an easy process, faster than if you were to Google it - because it's within your own content base and not competing with the rest of the world’s postings.

This is possible in part because sophisticated processing of the content can adapt the content from being optimized for authoring to being optimized for publishing. In larger implementations, these transformations can be exceedingly intensive and can be costly to create, maintain and execute. An XML server has the capabilities to read and transform unreadable content into readable and usable information - once locked and buried before. And, now that the vault of information say in a medical journal content base can be searched, numerous amounts of new products can be created from it.

Training materials, books and school texts can all be created from the server bank of medical information. Instead of rewriting the material for a book, take the information already written and repurpose it and turn it into a reusable, smaller text book.

You can create several different kinds of books from this content base, just depending on who your audience is. One medical training manual could be published for one group of readers, whereas a medical debate pamphlet could be written for another audience of people.

Discover DITA paired with an XML server for your vast content library to create new works targeted to small groups or even individuals in multiple output formats and multiple products.

About the Author: Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about DITA and digital publishing, go to Mark Logic