Culture Shock! When Taxonomy and DITA Collide
Presentation Abstract
Taxonomy lets your internal and external users exploit diverse information sources. This “knowledge organization” approach seems a natural fit for DITA content. Yet taxonomy and DITA must resolve cultural differences to truly help each other.
What can attendees expect to learn?
Taxonomy is hugely helpful whenever disparate information sources need to be mapped and indexed. To DITA users, taxonomy may seem like familiar ground, as it is usually associated with hierarchical structures that describe information through metadata. However, as these two domains move closer together, their very different approaches become clear. DITA has often been used to structure types of information rather than the granular subject matter of the information. Taxonomy uses an established “knowledge organization” approach with some new statistical analysis techniques to identify and describe real-world entities. These different paradigms have a very real impact when we are integrating systems and educating content teams. Joe Pairman shows how, by using the best of both, and not attempting to make one do the job of another, taxonomy and DITA can work very well together, enabling internal knowledge organization and making it easier for external users to curate our content.
Meet the Presenter
Joe Pairman is Lead Consultant at Mekon Ltd., helping clients realize the full potential of structured content and taxonomy. Before joining Mekon, he led the implementation of a DITA XML-based component content management system at HTC, driving development of the information model, solving numerous publishing and localization challenges, and designing the support content architecture for HTC’s help app and responsive website.