Quality technical documentation is important for knowledge transfer. Those societies that lacked a written language were limited on the technological complexity they could achieve. Historical examples refer to the Egyptians and the Sumerians for the development of writing and the ability to store writing in tablets, the first portable objects. Nowadays we have laptops and tablets which are more portable than their stone counterparts. However, maintaining the quality of the documentation has not necessarily improved, especially when the documentation is as voluminous and needs regular updating as that in the aviation industry.
Aviation deals with complex machines . For example, the aircraft flight manual for the GulfStream IV is over 4,000 pages long.
The traditional methods of creating multiple outputs from one document, like the ‘cut and paste’ technique, are too cumbersome and time-consuming. Also, the current economic climate is characterised by tighter budgets, fewer resources, and more demanding customers.
A solution exists in the form of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (Dita), developed by IBM.
The name Darwin is a reference to the naturalist Charles Darwin since Dita utilises the principles of inheritance for specialisation. E.g. a Gulfstream IV is a specialisation of an aircraft and inherits the general characteristics of an aircraft.
Dita was originally designed for technical information based on an information architecture of ‘concept, task and reference.’ It is also a model for extension both of design and of processes. For example, a concept could be ‘Motor oil keeps your car & engine running smoothly. Oil should be changed every 6,000 kilometers’ and then provided the ‘how to’ change the oil. Reference information is also given, e.g. ‘Oils are divided into grades, not weights.
Dita also contains components called ‘maps’. Maps do not contain content but are similar to the table of contents in traditional documentation. A Dita map applies context to the topics and also organises topics for different output – web, print/PDF etc. One map can produce a one-page maintenance checklist and another map can produce a complete maintenance manual.
It also uses the principle of single-source publishing where the different outputs are built by re-using components (topics) from a centralised source (repository).
Dita also has the potential to help solve some of the problems of the semantic web through the use of semantic tagging. This also allows users of Dita, to see some clear associations of HTML5 elements with structures in both Dita topics and Dita maps.
Topics, in Dita jargon, are directly equivalent to the content of the HTML5
element, and maps are clearly equivalent to the content in a element.
There is also a greater type of synergy as well between HTML5 and Dita – topics and maps each have an almost-by-design relationship with the recommended layout of a web page based on HTML5 principles. Dita and its use in the semantic web and in the HTML domain is a worthwhile direction for future research.
This research work was part of the requirements for an MSc (Hons) in Business Information Systems Management and is partially funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship which is part-financed by the European Union – European Social Fund under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality Of Life”.