Topic-oriented authoring creates reusable content organized around an audience’s primary unit of use, the safest and most scalable reuse strategy for most modular content. The same topics can be reused, reassembled, and reorganized for different media and for different variations on a subject, such as documentation for product variants, by using DITA maps to encode higher-level structure, such as chapters or even Web pages, outside the topics that make up a deliverable.

Scenario

A small technical publications team for a mobile phone vendor can organize the same content differently to optimize the user experience for a book versus a Web site. They can use the bookmap specialization to provide book-specifi c items, such as a cover page, notices page, and appendices, and another DITA map for the HTML output that does not require these items. They can also generate embedded online help from the same content for display directly on the phone.

The following figure shows the same topics appearing in multiple maps.

Figure 3. Multiple maps using same topics 

Investment

The major activities at this level are to break the content down into topics that are stored as individual files, and then to use DITA maps to collect and organize the content for output as specific deliverables. This effort requires that you create an information architecture that includes the following information:

• Lowest level of reuse, which may be at the phrase, element, topic, or map level.
• Strategy for content reuse, which identifies the mechanisms for reuse at each level.
• Metadata, which can be used for both build-time and run-time filtering if it is standardized and properly managed.
• User access paths, which specify how users access content and then navigate through deliverables using links between topics.

The ability to reuse content in a scalable manner depends upon knowing what you have, how it fits together, and what you need to do with it.

Return

At this second level of adoption, you realize the value of fl exible reuse by using DITA maps to assemble each deliverable. Because each map is specific to a deliverable, you can optimize the content to include the organization of the content and the links between the topics for each deliverable type.

DITA maps provide a way to abstract the relationships between topics that result in links from the topics and to specify the relationships within the map. This ability is crucial for reuse. You cannot reuse a topic in multiple components if it has a hard-coded link to another topic that might not be included in every component. When you specify component-specific relationships in the maps rather than including links in topics, you are free to use the topic in any component where the content applies without fear of broken links.

In the following figure, Map 1 and Map 2 reference specific topics in a repository to generate multiple deliverable outputs.

Figure 4. Multiple maps using the same topics