Dynamic Chunking of Component-Authored Information
Thursday, October 1 — 4:00pm-4:45pm
Ben Colborn
Manager, Technical Publications
Nutanix
Owen Richter
MTS - Web Application Architect
Nutanix
In topic-based information development environments such as DITA, the perennial question is “How large should a topic be?” While the topic-oriented approach has been shown to be suitable for authoring, only two levels of presentation are common: an entire set of content as a book (which may run into hundreds of pages), or component-by-component as authored.
The first (monolithic) presentation type is deficient because readers are not able to easily locate the information relevant to their situation.
The second (fragmented) presentation type is deficient because it is not aligned with information-seeking behavior.
We have implemented a document structure of recursively nested information components that allows a web application to dynamically chunk information according to the reader’s behavior. At publication time, the source components are translated to granular chunks with an index, then further compiled into a recursive format that describes nesting and ancestry.
As with other presentation types, the information can be viewed in a single long document or addressed at the base component level. In addition, intermediate levels of presentation are possible. When the user selects an item from the table of contents, the component and all children components are displayed as a single chunk. Parent chunks are accessible through TOC and breadcrumb navigation that is defined in the document. After moving to a parent chunk, the starting point chunk is included as a child. The varying levels of granularity allow for search results to more accurately present a document properly scoped to the user’s needs.
In addition, dynamic chunking supports well-documented “information foraging” behavior much better than the granular presentation approach, while preserving addressability that is lacking in monolithic presentation. After exploring the advantages of dynamic chunking, we will describe the publishing processes that transform the source DITA content to the dynamic presentation.
About
Ben Colborn is manager of technical publications at Nutanix, a Silicon Valley IT infrastructure startup. In addition to writing documentation for support engineers, partners, and customers, he is involved in implementing an intelligent content strategy in his group and in collaboration with other parts of the company. Previously he worked at Citrix Education, where he developed instructor-led training material and eLearning for Citrix virtualization technologies and also participated in implementing DITA for training.
Owen Richter is a Web Application Architect for the Customer Support Organization of Nutanix, a Silicon Valley cloud computing startup. While at Nutanix, Owen has been responsible for implementing the documentation and search functions on the Nutanix Customer Support website. Owen currently works almost exclusively as a JavaScript Programmer who also works extensively with SQL and MongoDB. In addition to documentation and search, he specializes in data analysis and visualization.
