Duration: 2 days standard version, 3 days to incorporate a group project (shorter versions available but limits scope and practice)
Hands-on? Yes (many practice exercises)
Delivery: Web conferencing, onsite
STC Chapters: Please contact Cheri about a version of this workshop for STC meetings and regional conferences.
This hands-on workshop provides an overview of concepts, best practices, and approaches for writing topic-based information. You will learn to apply key principles as you examine a variety of topics and documents, and you will learn about the benefits and difficulties of moving to a topic-based approach. Along the way, you will have the opportunity to apply topic-based authoring to your own documents.
What is topic-based authoring?
Topic-based authoring is a modular approach to content development in which standalone units of information, called topics, are assembled to create information products. This content development strategy results in lean, focused, and reusable content.
The movement toward content management has revitalized topic-based authoring, since is it central to XML-based solutions such as DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). But topic-based authoring has actually been in practice, especially among those who create online help systems, for some time. DITA strengthens the idea of topic-based authoring by giving it a formal structure, but you can practice topic-based authoring in any authoring environment.
Objectives
Through discussion and practice, you will:
- Understand what topic-based authoring is
- Understand key definitions and components of topic-based information
- Understand how to identify and create key topic types
- Understand and practice the process of approaching and applying topic-based authoring strategies to both new and existing information
- Identify the key components of a well-written topic
- Learn to create topic models and information types, and apply them to topic-based development
- Apply best practices for creating and assembling topics
- Learn to create topic maps to strengthen content development
- Practice creating topic-based information
- Assess whether topic-based authoring makes sense for your group and how best to put it into practice
Important Ideas and Questions
During the course, we will cover common ideas and questions about topic-based authoring, such as:
- What is a topic, and what are its key components?
- How do you “chunk” information into topics?
- How long should a topic be?
- Are there standard topics types you should be using?
- What are the benefits of topic-based authoring?
- When should topics be specialized? How do you go about specialization?
- How do you apply topic-based information when you are writing content for different audiences or contexts?
- How do you apply topic-based authoring to reuse and re-assemble information?
- What is the most feasible way to implement a model?
- How do you create and use a topic model?
- What is the best approach for rewriting legacy information with a topic-based methodology?
- Is a content management system required for topic-based authoring? What about DITA and XML?
- What kinds of process and team changes are necessary to support topic-based authoring? Is it worth it?