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Asked: 2026-05-23T08:21:55+00:00

Can anybody explain /for dummies :)/ relationship between these (mostly oasis) standards? DocBook, DITA,

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Can anybody explain /for dummies :)/ relationship between these (mostly oasis) standards?

  • DocBook, DITA, OpenDocument
  • CMIS
  • MoReq2

As i understand yet:

  • DITA, DocBook and OpenDocument – are standards for file formats of documents
  • CMIS is something what I need explain
  • MoReq2 – is a standard for digital archives for storing metadata about the documents (record management standard)

So, for the portable solutions need

  • store documents in the above formats (when in the what one?)
  • and need describe them with MoReq2 schemas
  • but where to come CMIS?

Or i’m totally wrong?

Ps: Understand than it is an complex question, but nowhere find any simply explanation of their relationship.

ps2: plus question – have any of the above support in perl?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The topics I know best are the first three (DocBook, DITA, OpenDocument).

    DocBook and DITA are standards for writing potentially long technical documents, in which you do not specify any style or presentation. Rather, you just write text, and then you can tag the text with information about its role (whether it is a keyword, whether it is a warning note, etc). This way, you can then use stylesheets to apply consistent style to all of your text, and you can produce multiple publication formats from it.

    DocBook focuses more on providing a large set of tags that covers every common case, while DITA focuses on a bare minimum that is easy to extend. Another difference is that DocBook encourages you to think in terms of long documents, whereas DITA encourages you to think in reusable “modular” documents.

    Both DocBook and DITA documents would be stored in multiple files. A single document could be from tens to thousands of files.

    OpenDocument is a standard for specific office documents. As such, an OpenDocument document would often be a single file. An OpenDocument document is more specific than DocBook or DITA. It is less likely to be a book, and more likely to be a letter, a specification, a spreadsheet or a presentation. Also, unlike DocBook and DITA, OpenDocument will very likely contain style information (colours, numbering, etc), because the text is not necessarily related to any other document and is only used once.

    Each of DocBook, DITA and OpenDocument are formats used to store text in files. Usually these are XML files.

    CMIS. I have never heard of this before today, but I do know about content management systems. I can therefore tell you that it is a headache to try to manage the path that a certain piece of text is supposed to take from the repository, disk or database where it is stored, up to the book, webpage, help system or blog where it is supposed to be published. Content management systems help you specify data for large sets of files; this data can then be used by a tool to decide where to publish a document, or just a piece of information. A content management system can be as simple as two folders on your hard drive: any files put in one folder should be published for example as PDFs in Chinese, whereas files put into the second folder should be published in as blog entries in German and Turkish.

    Now, content management systems are usually much more sophisticated than that, and there are many of them. I imagine that CMIS is an abstract layer that lets you allow different content management systems to inter-operate, if by chance you have invested in more than one of them.

    Finally, MoReq2. Again, I only discovered this today, and unlike CMIS, I don’t even have experience with record keeping. However, you have two answers from @Tasha and @Marc Fresko which should give you a good starter.

    What I imagine about MoReq2 is that it can help you manage the lifecycle of your documents. For example, you may want to specify that a certain policy document is only valid until 2010, or that it has been deprecated already. I also imagine that MoReq2 is much, much more than that.

    To sum up, all of these standards concern document management. DocBook, DITA and OpenDocument are about writing and storing documents. CMIS is about managing where the documents go. And MoReq2 seems to be about how long they live.

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