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Content re-use
Re-use and the DITA Maturity Model
Content re-use is one of the features that you should adopt early in your move from style-based authoring to structured authoring with DITA.

Introduction
Information types and topics
Topics are the building blocks of modular documents, and organising topics by semantic information types is one of the architectural features of DITA.
DITA map files
Syntax and mark-up
Language and punctuation
Graphics and figures
Cross-referencing
Cross-references are a means of binding individual topics into a coherent and navigable document.
Content re-use
- Content re-use definition
  Content re-use is a means of improving efficiency by eliminating repetition of phrases, blocks of text, topics, and even collections of topics.
- Re-use and the DITA Maturity Model
  Content re-use is one of the features that you should adopt early in your move from style-based authoring to structured authoring with DITA.
- The content reference (conref) attribute
  The conref feature allows DITA content to be used in any number of different places in a collection. The conref attribute in a referencing topic specifies the source topic and the element within that topic to re-use.
- Re-use practices
- Variables
- Organising re-use topics and elements
- Embedded topics and ditamaps
  The ditamap is a powerful tool for re-using topics in different output publications. Topics can also be re-used using ditabase topics, but you should avoid this technique.
- Advanced conref principles
Metadata, conditional processing, and indexing
The DITA documentation process
DITA authoring concepts
Moving from style-based authoring to a structured authoring methodology such as DITA requires a radically different approach to writing.

Re-use and the DITA Maturity Model

Content re-use is one of the features that you should adopt early in your move from style-based authoring to structured authoring with DITA.

The DITA Maturity Model¹ proposed by Michael Priestley and Amber Swope suggests that there are six levels of DITA adoption that an organisation can embrace.

The six levels are:

topics
scaleable re-use
specialisation and customisation
automation and integration
semantics on demand
unified semantic ecosystem

The second level, beyond simply using DITA as a topic format, is characterised by the introduction of re-use. In other words, re-use should be one of the first DITA features that you adopt. A good understanding of re-use, and in particular how the conref (or content reference) idea works, is required for DITA best practice.

¹ Just Systems Whitepaper, http://na.justsystems.com/files/Whitepaper-DITA_MM.pdf