How do aerospace organizations ensure that reusable content remains consistent and up-to-date?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Ensuring the consistency and up-to-date status of reusable content is a critical concern for aerospace organizations utilizing DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). Reusable content can be used across various documents and, therefore, must be consistent and reflect the most current information. Aerospace organizations employ several strategies to achieve this:

1. Version Control: Aerospace organizations implement version control systems to manage reusable content. These systems keep track of different versions of a content component and allow users to access and reuse the most up-to-date version. DITA content components are tagged with version information, making it easy to identify and select the latest version for use in documents.

2. Metadata Tagging: Metadata plays a crucial role in content management. Aerospace organizations tag content components with metadata indicating their modification date, author, and validity. Metadata can be used to automatically check the content’s relevance and freshness. For example, an automated system can flag content components that haven’t been updated in a predefined period, prompting content creators to review and refresh them.

Here’s a simple example of how version control and metadata tagging are implemented in DITA:

<!-- Example of DITA Version Control and Metadata Tagging -->
<topic id="component1" version="2.0" last-modified="2023-10-15" author="John Doe">
  <title>Reusable Procedure</title>
  <body>
    <!-- Content goes here -->
  </body>
</topic>

In this example, the DITA topic is tagged with version information and metadata such as the last modification date and the author. This allows users to identify the content’s version and author and track when it was last modified. Aerospace organizations use such practices to maintain content consistency and keep it up to date across various documents.