Preliminary exploration of using RDF for annotating DITA topics on agroforestry

Abstract

Collections of topics composed with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) depend on annotations for improved search and retrieval. Through a set of metadata capabilities embedded in the DITA markup authors can define controlled values to identify and classify the subject matter of the content as well as to express the hierarchy and relationships between DITA elements and non-DITA resources. However, while these mechanisms typically provide both structural and semantic markup of DITA topics, it is difficult to manage, extend, and integrate a growing volume of DITA-based content and make them available for more intelligent Semantic Web services. Rather, the search and retrieval of DITA topics can benefit if combined with annotations captured in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The paper addresses the issue of making the semantics of DITA XML documents explicit by using RDF for annotating existing documents. It reviews options for lifting DITA XML data into RDF for ease of processing. The paper shows that enriching DITA topics with semantic annotations helps to make DITA content more comprehensible and accessible, and improves the semantic interoperability among DITA topic instances. It concludes with general observations and an outlook on future work on exploiting the mapping and linking of DITA topics with RDF for improved sharing of data across collections as well as Linked Data. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.