DITA-SEMIA – DITA Semantic Information Architecture
DITA-SEMIA is a set of open-source tools that support information architects creating specialized, semantic DITA frameworks.
DITA-SEMIA’s plugins integrate well with the <oXygen/> XML editor and DITA-OT to support both authoring and publishing.
You can download and use all or individual parts of it for free according to the Apache License 2.0.
Are you using a specialized DITA framework for your documentation? SEMIA can help you and your authors with the following tasks:
- Strong author guidance
- Automated consistency and plausibility checks
- Integration of external data sources (structured data to DITA)
- Extraction of data (DITA to structured data)
- Automated generation of texts and figures (DITA to DITA and DITA to SVG)
The idea of DITA-SEMIA has originally been inspired by integrated development environments like Eclipse and MS Visual Studio: The strong support that these tools provide for writing source code should be available for writing software specification and documentation as well. That includes content completion, automatic validation with quick fixes, online help and refactoring tools.
However, the resulting features of DITA-SEMIA can be used for other document types not related to software as well.
Development Status
This project is no more under active development since the main distributor (Patrik Stellmann) left the company that originated this project and there is no successor. However, there is still a good chance to get some hints when you add an issue.
Sample Use Cases
The following examples illustrate DITA-SEMIA use cases:
- Specifying a GUI
- The author selects the UI elements and its properties from a drop down list
- The framework checks compliance to the general guidelines of the UI concept.
- The framework generates an embedded figure of the client mask.
- Integrating external data
- The system architect describes a software component in DITA.
- A software developer maintains a list of configuration parameters in Excel.
- The framework embeds the related configuration parameters of the Excel sheet into the DITA document.
- Defining and referencing specialized key elements
- The author describes an enumeration type and its values with a specialized key in a DITA topic.
- The author references one of the enumeration values in another DITA topic with a specialized key reference element.
- A dialog displays a list of all known keys. The author can filter the list.
- The framework inserts a key reference and displays the corresponding name of the value in author mode.
- The framework provides a link to the definition in author mode.
- Extracting an XML Schema
- The author describes the interface of a web service in a specialized DITA tables.
- A transformation scenario generates an XSD file.
License
DITA-SEMIA is licensed for use under the Apache License 2.0. You can find a copy of the Apache License 2.0 in the root directory of each repository.
Special Thanks...
... to et-technologies for providing an open source license of Java profiler.