Project background

This idea came to me when we (NXP Customer Documentation Services) decided to publish the metadata of our products and documents as RDF in order to solve the siloization of our various data types, define company-wide data models and so that external organizations can easily consume this data.

I set up the publication of the metadata about binary documents (data sheets, user manuals, etc.), but since our DITA content was built on complex relationships (topic reuse) and was our primary format for translation, we needed a proper ontology to describe it. The driver was to provide detailed metrics to authors and greatly facilitate certain internal processes such as the selection of the content to translate or the detection of inconsistencies in the status of documents. Indeed, we considered that being able to formulate multidimensional queries across topics, maps, users, products and company divisions was a major step ahead.

The driver was consequently mostly internal, but we plan to publish a subset of this metadata when we go live with the whole public data set. Follow @nxpdata to get the latest updates about the linked data published by NXP.

Finally, since the challenges we faced were most likely similar to the ones faced by other DITA-enabled organizations, I decided to share my findings.

Since April 2015, I'm an independent consultant based in Rennes, France (my website).