The DITA Open Toolkit, or dita-ot for short, is a set of Java-based, open source tools that provide a "reference implementation" for processing DITA maps and topical content.

The home page of the DITA Open Toolkit is http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/. The DITA Open Toolkit Installation Guide, which is on that page, contains a list of supporting open-source software to download, together with a set of versions that are known to be compatible.

This article will provide resources and ideas for how to use the Toolkit at your site or with your products that support DITA.

We plan to develop the following resource topics:

• suggestions for a low-end repeatable process
• best practices for including toolkit components in products
• how users can update the toolkit between product upgrades
• the role of plugins
• contributing to the DITA-OT project
• about licenses
• more...