The S1000D specification for technical documentation brings new international interoperability to the defense industry, and also for other technically oriented industries. Previous attempts at establishing a standard led to fragmentation - too many groups were pushing different military specifications. This resulted in consumers of information having to deal with different types of Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs) for different types of weapons systems. But S1000D is making more headway, and more quickly, than past efforts and is gaining support from many quarters. Almost every tech-doc gathering, for example, includes sessions devoted to the specification.
S1000D is making very definite inroads throughout the defense industries, both in the U.S. and Europe. The Global Hawk (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) has been using the specification for the past two-and-a-half years and the F117A stealth fighter program has been using it for at least four years. The British Royal Navy is using it for its Type 45 Destroyer and the German Army is using it for the Leopold Tank. A number of other defense projects are using S1000D too.
S1000D is maintained by the Technical Publications Specification Maintenance Group (TPSMG), which operates under the banner of the U.S. Aerospace Industries Association and Aerospace and Defense Industries Association of Europe.
Unlike many European defense organizations, the Department of Defense hasn't officially signed up for the specification. But growing numbers of U.S. defense programs are using the specification, and there are a number of pilot projects in progress. Many believe it is only a matter of time before the DoD officially adopts S1000D. At the recent Aerospace Industries Association's product support conference (May 13), titled "Logistics Transformation, A Systems Approach," Jerry Beck of the Office of the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Logistics Plans & Programs emphatically stated that OSD will be adopting S1000D as the new standard for the US Military.
Adopting the S1000D standard offers many advantages. It reduces support costs, enables modularity and content reuse, makes it easy to share data across different computing platforms, and allows users to view electronic documentation via a common web browser or text viewer. Let's look at these benefits in more detail:
1) Data sharing
With S1000D, countries from around the world that take equipment and supporting documentation from the U.S. and Europe can be sure that the technical information on all of their projects will be compatible and viewable on their computer systems. Since they are all set-up to use the same standard their systems would not need significant modifications to load S1000D data produced by another organization.
2) Off-the-shelf savings
Since there will be a single standard across the services, run by an independent group (TPSMG), organizations using S1000D will save the cost of developing and sustaining DTDs, FOSIs etc, and savings will be made in related products such as authoring and management tools because the vendors are supporting S1000D in their COTS (commercial off the shelf) products.
3) Content reuse
The specification cuts out unnecessary rework of data and promotes the reuse of text and graphical content. S1000D documents are stored in a database of data modules. These data modules are made up of text in the form of SGML and XML instances and, together with their associated graphics, are geared to content reuse. A module is created once and can be used in any amount of publications, which hugely speeds up the creation of documents.
4) Common source database
A major component of S1000D is the common source database. It controls the data modules, which can number in the thousands for a publishing project. Traditionally, electronic manuals involved the management of huge SGML or XML files. These were usually managed through a dedicated SGML/XML aware content management system. Any good CMS will certainly help the author find the relevant part quickly, but there is often a reduction in performance as the size of the source file increases. In contrast, the indexing of smaller files in a common source database keeps the search and organizational process fast.
5) What's next?
The latest issue of S1000D - version 2.2 - was released on May 16th at the TPSMG user forum held in Clearwater, Florida. Notable additions include interactive capabilities intended to promote the development of electronic technical manuals. There are a number of pilot projects, and they're being well received. We would expect that momentum would continue to rapidly build over the next several years.