Sounds Like a Job for Metadata and Taxonomy!

Are you familiar with DITA? No, not that glamorous pin-up that used to date Marilyn Manson, rather Darwin Information Typing Architecture? Well, The Content Wrangler blog features an article by Paul Wlodarczyk about employing DITA, essentially an XML-based architecture , in conjunction with our old friends metadata and taxonomy, to generally improve findability for content and objects.

This article and all links make a somewhat complex and murky subject seem accessible, examining many specific examples of how DITA could be used and where organizations sometimes fall short (probably because they do not fully understand the power of DITA).

It is eye opening to find out how underutilized the DITA structure can be even when used in enterprise endeavors. Considering that DITA "provides a relatively rich and extensible framework for embedding metadata directly within the XML objects themselves,"the possibilities for improving search and in dynamic publishing and workflow automation should provide suitable enticement.

This article wraps up with a nice succinct list of best practices. I feel like I learned something!