An XML Architecture for Technical Documentation: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
http://winwriters.com/articles/DITA/index.html

Day, Don, Erik Hennum, John Hunt, Michael Priestley, David Schell and Nancy Harrison
WritersUA
2004

Abstract:

DITA is an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains, allowing groups to create very specific, targeted document type definitions using a process called specialization, while at the same time reusing common output transforms and design rules. We discuss several methods that can be used to extend DITA's basic topic types.