History

In 2000, a cross-company workgroup composed of members from IBM user assistance groups developed DITA. In April of 2005, IBM donated DITA to the OASIS standards organization. The OASIS DITA Technical Committee now defines and manages DITA.

What is OASIS?

OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is a non-profit consortium which promotes the creation, sharing, and use of open standards for the world-wide information society.

What is the OASIS Technical Committee?

The OASIS Technical Committee is a committee of OASIS which defines and manages DITA as well as promotes using DITA to generate standard information types and domain-specific markup vocabularies. There is also a DITA Adoption Committee, which focuses on promoting and educating people on the usefulness of DITA, as well as various active and subcommittees including the:

• DITA Help Subcommittee
• DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization Subcommittee
• DITA Semiconductor Information Design Subcommittee
• DITA Technical Communication Subcommittee

Several more subcommittees exist, though they are currently inactive.

What is the Most Recent Specification?

On December 1, 2010, OASIS approved the Oasis DITA 1.2 specification.

Previous specifications include:

• Version 1.1 on May 31, 2007
• Version 1.0 on June 1, 2005