The OASIS DITA Technical Committee has realized that parts of the DITA 1.2 specification do not unambigiously cover important questions about keys. We offer the following FAQ items in advance of an DITA 1.2 errata:

Q1: Given multiple key definitions, how does a processor determine which key definition is effective?

Q2: What should rendering tools display in the place of elements which have a keyref attribute?

Authored by Bob Doyle, this article was published in the April 2008 issue of Intercom.

The article contains an overview of the key features of DITA tools: authoring tools, management tools, and publishing engines. Especially noteworthy are the matrixes which compare features -- including price -- of DITA editors and DITA content management systems (CMS).

Many resources are available to explain what Darwin Information Typing
Architecture (DITA) topic specialization is and the syntax to implement
it, but you still might be wondering "I have some content that might be a
candidate for topic specialization. What's next?" This tutorial
walks you through a series of steps to evaluate your content's suitability
for different DITA topic types, specialize one of those types, and test
your specialization using the DITA Open Toolkit.

The DITA Users website (www.ditausers.org) has a number of DITA resources:

DITA News. About 30 places to go for news about DITA.

DITA Websites. 20 of the important websites covering DITA today.

DITA Mailing Lists. 6 mailing lists with frequent mentions of DITA.

DITA Publications. 37 publications and a link to a few dozen great presentations on DITA.

DITA Communities. 11 communities, mostly in North America so far.

DITA Glossary. A glossary of about 50 DITA-related terms, which can be syndicated to serve on your website.

A one-page summary listing of DITA resources.

Joint meeting of the Central Texas DITA User Group and the RTP DITA Users' Group on September 24, 2008. Presentations by Mike Harris, Robert Berry, and Paul Arellanes (IBM).

DITA contains ready-to-go metadata structures, but what are best practices for using those solutions in a meaningful way for your writing teams? Learn what team members should know and who to identify to take on the tasks related to taxonomy definitions. Also decide how to identify those taxonomy definitions in your content management system (CMS).

Additional resources:

Need help with your DITA implementation? This is the group for you.

An article from: Technical Communication, by Michael Priestley, Gretchen Hargis, Susan Carpenter. Avaialble from Amazon.

DITA links, info, event calendar, and (free) user group web hosting.

by JoAnn Hackos, PhD - President, Comtech Services and co-editor of DITA Specifications