DITA is an open standard to structure documentation and is therefore often used in technical writing.

It stands for “Darwin Information Typing Architecture”.

• Darwin: a set of information models that can evolve and be specialised to account for the client’s particular authoring and publishing needs.
• Information Typing: content is organised in chunks of information called “topics” and topics are categorised by the type of information they contain: task, concept or reference (or others).
• Architecture: a set of standardised, open-source well-documented information models for various types of content.

DITA was originally developed by IBM but since 2005 it is defined and maintained by OASIS, a non-profit consortium comprised of members from the technology industry, users and influencers.

• Reuse
  • single sourcing (content ↔ context)
  • multichannel publishing (content ↔ output)
• Collaboration with other authors
• Minimalism
• Structured authoring
• Intelligent content
• Conditional content
• Writing for translation

DITA and structured authoring are closely related. The first three DITA features are also structured authoring features.

As DITA is an open standard, you can consult the DITA specifications for free on the internet:

• DITA 1.3
  http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/dita/v1.3/errata01/os/complete/part0-overview/dita-v1.3-errata01-os-part0-overview-complete.html
• DITA 1.2
  http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/DITA1.2-spec.html