In an effort to maximize DITA reuse potential, Stilo adds exact-match deduplication to the latest release of its well-established cloud service.

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Migrating documentation to DITA has many benefits, chief among them being the opportunity to reduce cost and improve quality by reusing content. A documentation set might have reuse potential as high as 50%, however, finding good reuse candidates may prove to be difficult, especially when dealing with thousands of topics. Hence the need for automation.

The first step in the deduplication process is for the user to take the newly created DITA files and put them into a collection. At this point, the automated system compares each topic against the others in that collection. Once redundancies are identified, the system selects the canonical version, automatically eliminates redundant copies, and then updates topics and associated maps.

“Up until today, our Migrate conversion platform has focused on converting legacy content, such as HTML, Word, and FrameMaker, to DITA XML,” says Bryan Tipper, CEO of Stilo. “With this new deduplication functionality, Migrate can now identify and eliminate redundant topics as part of that conversion process, and utilize the reuse mechanisms that were intended by the DITA architecture.”