For a better understanding of DITA, please read the recent series of articles on DITA that were published in Arbortext's XML Publishing Network newsletter:

Wikipedia,  the free encyclopedia, describes DITA as "an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. The architecture and a related DTD and a W3C-Schema was developed by IBM ... Unlike book-oriented approaches that are based on chapters and pages, DITA uses topics - small chunks of information that can be easily reused across various contexts and deliverables. DITA also has built-in extensibility support, meaning you can customize document type definitions (or DTDs) without breaking compatibility with existing applications and processes.

The Center for Information-Development Management is an organization of information-development, training, and support managers across the United States and internationally. The CIDM is directed by Dr. JoAnn Hackos,  international leader in the management of the design, development and dissemination of information to customers and employees.