Glossary · Maps and linking

DITA bookmap

Also known as: bookmap, book map

In DITA, a bookmap is a specialized map for organizing topics into a book, with elements for book-level metadata, front matter, parts, chapters, appendices and back matter.

DITA
Maps and linking

In one sentence

A DITA bookmap is a specialized map for books: title and book metadata, front matter, parts, chapters, appendices and back matter.

Example

A bookmap for the “AP-200 user manual” with notices and a table of contents in the front matter, five chapters and one appendix of specifications.

How it applies

Technical documentation: Bookmaps are used for deliverables with a book structure: manuals, guides and handbooks that are printed or published as PDF.
Structure: Besides <booktitle> (with <mainbooktitle>) and <bookmeta> for book-level metadata such as authors, part numbers and publication dates, a bookmap has <frontmatter> (preface, notices, generated lists such as <toc/>), <chapter> and <part> elements, <appendices> and <backmatter> (for example <glossarylist> and <indexlist/>).
AI and retrieval: Bookmap metadata — part numbers, editions, release dates — identifies which version of a manual a topic belongs to, which matters when a model must answer for a specific product release.

Bookmap vs. map

A bookmap is a specialization of the generic map. Processors that do not know the bookmap still treat it as a map; processors that do can generate book-specific output such as title pages, tables of contents and indexes.

In DITA markup

<bookmap>
  <booktitle><mainbooktitle>AP-200 user manual</mainbooktitle></booktitle>
  <frontmatter><notices href="notices.dita"/><booklists><toc/></booklists></frontmatter>
  <chapter href="filter-basics.dita"/>
  <appendices><appendix href="filter-specs.dita"/></appendices>
</bookmap>