Difference between DITA and S1000D
I'm trying to understand the technical difference between DITA and S1000D.
Yes, I know, the common wisdom is that if you need documentation for helicopter or submarine, you should use S1000D, and if you need documentation for software, you should use DITA. While this is true, it is too shallow level of understanding.
With a lot of searching I found some articles about technical side of this difference, but still, it's completely unclear for me, probably because I never worked with DITA or S1000D before.
* From Slideshare presentation (slide 24):
DITA maps specify hierarchy and the relationships among the topics; they also provide the context in which keys are defined and resolved.
S1000D Publication Modules contain references to data modules, other publication modules, or legacy data of a publication and its structure.
* From one article, which in turn an excerpt from the book:
This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.
My note: The word "intra" applied to "data module", not "data".
* From another article:
Both S1000D and DITA use the same underlying concepts and aims ... (from here to the end of the article).
* Also, in one another article it is clearly stated that DITA and S1000D are assuming completely different types of authoring. 312
DITA is topic-based, while S1000D is module-based:
There is one more major alternative to the book based and topic based DTD and that is to chop up the XML content in modules. In our meaning not that far from the topic based but it is really about linking it to the product structure.
My note: Well, from what I read about there are different types of modules in S1000D. We have "data modules" which are something similar DITA's "topics" and we have "publishing modules" which are something similar to DITA's "maps". For this reason, it's not clear which one of them implied within "modular-based authoring" term. Authoring based on data modules or authoring based on publishing modules? Argh.
So, what is the techinical difference between DITA and S1000D? How DITA's topic-based approach differs from S1000D's module-based approach? Does it all mean that S1000D is not so flexible in content reuse as DITA (see second quote in my post), and how exactly this unflexibility looks, in comparison with DITA? 312