Glossary · Information units

iiRDS Topic

Also known as: topic, topic module

In iiRDS (intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard), a Topic is an information unit that deals with a single subject and can be understood on its own — for example one task, one concept or one reference table.

iiRDS term
Ontology
Information architecture

In one sentence

An iiRDS Topic is a self-contained information unit about a single subject, with metadata that lets it be filtered, reused and delivered in context.

Example

The topic “Replacing the air filter”, delivered as an HTML rendition and tagged with the product component “air filter”, the required qualification “service technician” and the lifecycle phase “maintenance”.

In-depth wiki articleiiRDS Topic: the self-contained unit of topic-based documentation

Explained in context

Context cards connect this term with others to answer one question. Also in British English and German.

Every Page is Page One vs. semantic documentationIs Every Page is Page One a form of semantic documentation?UK Deutsch

How it applies

Technical documentation: The topic is the building block of topic-based authoring. A DITA topic or a module from a component content management system maps directly to an iiRDS Topic. The kinds of topic listed above (task, concept, reference) come from authoring practice; iiRDS describes the kind of a topic with metadata rather than with subclasses.
Safety: A safety topic keeps hazard, consequence and avoidance measures together. Delivered as one Topic, it reaches the reader complete, at the point of use.
AI and retrieval: Because a Topic is self-contained, it is a natural chunk for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Unlike a Fragment, it needs no surrounding text to be answered from correctly, and its metadata can be used as retrieval filters.

Topic vs. Fragment

A Topic can be understood on its own. A Fragment cannot: it only makes sense together with additional context, like a single warning taken out of a procedure. When in doubt, ask whether a reader could act on the unit without seeing anything else — if yes, it is a Topic.

In RDF

Shown in Turtle for readability — inside a package, metadata.rdf is written in RDF/XML.

@prefix iirds: <http://iirds.tekom.de/iirds#> .

<https://example.com/iirds/replace-air-filter> a iirds:Topic ;
    iirds:is-version-of <https://example.com/iirds/objects/replace-air-filter> ;
    iirds:has-rendition [
        a iirds:Rendition ;
        iirds:format "text/html" ;
        iirds:source "content/replace-air-filter.html"
    ] .