Topics and maps are the basic building blocks of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Metadata attributes and values can be added to DITA topics and maps, as well as to elements within topics, to allow for conditional publishing and content reuse.
DITA topics and maps are XML documents that conform to the XML specification. As such, they can be viewed, edited, validated, and processed with standard XML tools, although some DITA-specific features, such as content reference, key reference, and specialization require DITA-specific processing for full implementation and validation.