How do organizations ensure that specialized content remains up-to-date with evolving industry standards and practices?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Ensuring that specialized DITA content remains up-to-date with evolving industry standards and practices is crucial for maintaining the relevance and accuracy of documentation. Organizations employ several strategies to achieve this:

1. Regular Content Reviews: Periodic content reviews are conducted by subject matter experts (SMEs) and technical writers. These reviews aim to identify outdated information or content that no longer complies with industry standards. During the review process, identified sections are marked for revision.

2. Change Tracking: DITA allows for precise tracking of content changes. When industry standards or practices evolve, document changes are tracked and documented in DITA markup. For example, the <revhistory> element can be used to record revision details, and the <ph> element can be utilized to indicate areas where changes occurred. This ensures that any content changes related to industry standards are transparent.

Example:

<topic id="t1234">
  <title>Equipment Inspection</title>
  <revhistory>
    <revision>
      <date>2023-11-01</date>
      <revremark>Updated inspection criteria according to new ISO standards.</revremark>
    </revision>
  </revhistory>
  <body>
    <p>To perform equipment inspection, follow the latest <ph>ISO standards</ph> as per the November 2023 update.</p>
  </body>
</topic>

3. Content Validation: In order to verify the validity and compliance of content with updated industry standards, organizations conduct validation processes. These validations ensure that content is aligned with the latest practices and standards. Automated validation tools can be employed to check content against a predefined set of standards and flag areas that require updates.