Modular Documentation

Created on Saturday, 08 September 2007 18:17
Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 January 2013 22:30

Modular documentation is a method of building documents from blocks of information that have a standard information type (such as procedure, concept or reference) and/or standard content type (such as upgrade procedure, network diagram or server specification).

You see these blocks of information in all technical documents, but do they appear consistent in structure and location across a document set? If they do, they have probably been planned using a modular documentation method.

Building documents from modules provides significant benefits to the information designer, documentation manager and end-user, including:

Modular documentation employs an information type architecture to define the standard templates for modules. A common information type architecture is DITA (Darwin Information Type Architecture), originally developed by IBM. DITA has three standard information types (task, concept and reference) and a DITA map to pull them together into a document structure.

Modular documentation is recorded in a content specification (similar to the DITA map mentioned above). In mature industries or companies, the content specifications may be standardised as part of an operator model (such as the Telecom Operator Model, TOM) or framework (such as the Microsoft Operations Framework, MOF). In simple terms, these provide the table of contents (TOC) for standard documents such as installation guides or functional specifications.