About specialization

Specialization is the process of creating new designs based on existing designs. A specialization can reuse elements from higher-level designs. You can specialize DITA to create customized information models that meet your business requirements while retaining the benefits of the existing DITA architecture.

The DITA architecture provides for a general base topic and its three specialized variations: concept, task, and reference topic types. Each specialized topic type DTD declares elements that are specific and restricted to only that topic type. For example, the task topic DTD allows <step> and <choice> elements that are absent from other topic DTDs.

You can specialize task, concept, and reference DITA topic types when you require new structural types or new domains. For example, you can tweak your design to increase consistency or descriptiveness or to meet specific output needs.