I want to thank everyone for their suggestions as to the origin of concept, task, and reference.

The only places I find these three consistently together are in work from IBM, including DITA itself, and in the book Developing Quality Technical Information, by Gretchen Hargis et al, which nowhere mentions DITA.

As Zev mentioned, Information Mapping was the first to define “Information Types” in their methodolgy for Structured Writing. I find the differences between IBM and Information Mapping types to be so great that the IBMers probably did not even know the earlier work. Or if they did, they blatantly ripped off Horn’s terminology without attribution.

Someone from the DITA design team should be able to clarify this history for us.

I think I see in the three information types - concept, task, and reference - a reflection of the three great user manuals of the golden age of software documentation, when some of us still read manuals in order.

In 1984 Apple called them, for example, Learning MacPaint, Using MacPaint and MacPaint Reference.

My first tech docs were the user manuals for my MacPublisher (the first DTP program), which shipped in the year of the Mac, in English, French, German, and Italian.

To this day, many O’Reilly books follow the triad of Learning PHP, Programming PHP, and PHP - the Definitive Reference.

I think the “Learning X” manual has just disappeared. It is now seen as too much theory, overview, and system description. For many software products, you now have only Getting Started and Using X.

John Carroll’s “minimalism” moved the primary documentation focus to the practical “how-to” kind of knowledge we discover by user and task analysis. In his book 1990 Nurnberg Funnel (p.7), Carroll defined minimalism as “allowing learners to start immediately on meaningfullly realistic tasks.” Today’s impatient users are not so interested in learning the theory and overview, they want the instant gratification of problem solutions.

So I see “task” as the primary topic type. It has always been the main type in our Help Authoring Tools. I see concept and reference as supporting task, but only as needed.

This helps me to understand what is expected in the concept and reference topic types.

It seems that the information types keep coming up over and over. In Hackos’ “Standards for Online Communication,” chapter 4 talks about information types. She has a small bibliography that doesn’t look like it answers Bob’s question, but through the bibliographies in those books he may be able to get on the path to an answer.

Hope this helps,

Alan

Microsoft started talking about topic types in 1994-95 in their guidelines
for authors writing for WinHelp 40 (Windows 95/NT Help). The topic types
mentioned were conceptual, procedural, and What’s This.

We had started talking about the topic type concept [Marcia’s note: I think he means “topic type idea”] at Wextech (creators of Doc-To-Help, the original Help authoring tool) as early as 1992-3. We rolled reference and overview into “conceptual,” and of we called tasks “procedures,” so we were already using “procedural” as our other topic type. God knows where we got these terms from.

Regards,

Paul Neshamkin
pauln@helpauthors.com

MS Help MVP
ComponentOne Doc-To-Help Certified Trainer and MVP
WexTech MVP, and Certified Trainer

The Paul Neshamkin Group
http://www.helpauthors.com
201-714-9525

Information Mapping does bear certain similarities, but because it predates
the use of DITA and XML by decades, there are important differences.

The DITA model architecture builds on “topics” while Information Mapping
utilizes “blocks and maps”. It may seem that perhaps blocks are topics, and Information Maps are DITA maps, but in practice, if you are a strict
practitioner of Information Mapping, these generalizations do not hold.
Sometimes Information Maps are topics, sometimes DITA Maps, similarly,
Blocks are may be represented a topic, sometimes as content units within
topics. It is important to establish how Information Mapping principles and
types will be applied if you choose to implement using DITA.

Additionally, DITA, which is an XML vocabulary, separates the
content/structure from the presentation. Since Information Mapping predated wide spread adoption of markup languages, it makes no such distinction.

Finally, DITA does not remove types so much as it generalizes on what types are. For example, Concept under DITA is anything “conceptual” while Concept under Information Mapping is a “definition”. Most new users find it easier to apply DITA than Information Mapping as it reduces the choices to the three main information types as opposed to the seven defined under the original work by Horn.

DITA types are based on the information typing developed by Robert E. Horn back in the 1970s. Horn later founded Information Mapping Inc. (www.infomap.com) to teach his methodology.

Horn defined seven information types; “concept” was one of them. What DITA calls a “task”, Horn called a “procedure”. The DITA “reference” most nearly matches Horn’s “structure”. The remaining four types (classification, process, principle, and fact) were dropped by the designers of DITA, probably because they don’t have much use in software or hardware documentation.

One of the earliest places I saw these terms defined (loosely) was in
“Developing Online Help for Windows” by Scott Boggan, David Farkas, and Joe
Welinske, published in 1993. At that time, topic types were “procedure” and
“command”. More comprehensive definitions were available in Cheryl Lockett
Zubak and Mary Deaton’s book, “Designing Windows 95 Help: A Guide to
Creating Online Documents”, published in 1996.

You could also contact Michael Priestly directly. He is one of the IBM engineers who helped develop it; his email is on the IBM pages.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita1/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita3/index.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/dita/faq.php

Regards,
Carla
***************************************
Carla Martinek, Senior Translation Coordinator/Editor
Zebra Technologies Corporation

I am trying to locate the origin of concept, task, and reference as the three basic information types.

Does anyone have any specific sources of this idea?

Thanks,

Bob.