Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, at lower cost. For most organizations these days, component content is achieved by using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you've got simple text documents to deal with. When you're using DITA and other component-oriented methods, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you're looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. It's logical that DITA users would turn to taxonomy and metadata to improve findability of their reusable content.

At the start of the session, Paul Wlodarczyk of Earley & Associates will explore the metadata capabilities within DITA and component content management systems, discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Erik Hennum, Michael Harris, and Robert Berry of IBM will follow with a discussion on IBM's processes for classifying content using these tools and developing applications that use this metadata to provide real end-user value and significant efficiency improvements for content developers. They will highlight the value of DITA-based approaches to taxonomy by discussing key features of the specialization and examine some of the uses of DITA-based metadata.