What role does content profiling play in content reuse strategies with DITA in the pharmaceutical industry?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Content profiling plays a pivotal role in content reuse strategies within the pharmaceutical industry using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It involves the systematic categorization and tagging of content components to enable their efficient retrieval and reuse across different documents, drug formulations, and regulatory submissions.

Granular Tagging

In DITA, content is granularly tagged using elements and attributes to describe its characteristics. Content profiling takes this a step further by adding metadata specific to pharmaceutical content. For example, a DITA topic related to drug interactions can be tagged with attributes like “therapeutic area,” “drug class,” and “interaction severity.” These attributes allow content profiling tools to identify and classify topics based on their relevance to specific drugs, making it easier to locate and reuse content that pertains to a particular pharmaceutical product.

Efficient Content Reuse

Once content is appropriately profiled, it becomes readily available for reuse in various contexts. Pharmaceutical organizations can assemble documents tailored to different drug dosages, packaging, and regulatory jurisdictions by pulling in relevant content components based on their profiling attributes. This approach ensures consistency and accuracy across documents while reducing duplication of effort and the risk of errors in content creation.

Example:

Here’s an example of content profiling in DITA for pharmaceutical content:


<topic id="drug_interactions" therapeutic-area="Cardiology" drug-class="Beta Blockers" interaction-severity="Moderate">
  <title>Drug Interactions with Beta Blockers in Cardiology</title>
  <body>
    <p>Information about potential drug interactions involving beta blockers in cardiology patients.</p>
  </body>

In this example, a DITA topic is tagged with attributes like “therapeutic-area,” “drug-class,” and “interaction-severity.” These attributes provide detailed information about the content, enabling efficient retrieval and reuse in specific pharmaceutical contexts.