S1000D
S1000D is an international specification for producing technical documentation using a Common Source Database. S1000D originated in the early 1980s and has since evolved by harmonizing the various national military specifications of participating nations into one specification framework. Up until 2000, S1000D was an air-specific specification but, since then, it has been modified to cover land and sea requirements as well.
This effort to establish commonality, wherever possible, has led to the following advantages:
- Cost savings on information generation – avoidance of duplications
- More economic support planning
- More cost-effective publication deliverables
- Uniformity of standard for participants in the project
- Standard format for data exchange to exploit future developments
- Enhanced interoperability
- Improved opportunity for clarity by use of Simplified English (SE)
- Easier and cheaper translation also possible because of SE
"S1000D is gaining international acceptance as the preferred standard for the delivery of technical information. Not only that, it is being used for applications outside its original market. The standard allows the control of data at the module level which ensures configuration control and allows customer-made packages to be assembled and, more importantly, allow a delivery to exactly match a customer's need."
Dennis Hoyland
Head of ILS and Engineering Policy
Technical Enabling Services, UK MoD
S1000D is a standards-based specification. It is open and neutral and facilitates the use of nonpropriety systems. Since each data module carries its own management data, capabilities for access, retrieval, and configuration control are all vast improvements over traditional technical manual systems. Its capability to reduce duplication to a minimum is unmatched and, since data modules can be used, reused, and repurposed across other projects and other nations, its support for interoperability is also unmatched.
Since S1000D is now fully supported by the use of XML (previously, it was SGML only), the connectivity between S1000D-based information and other XML-based systems is maximized. The core concept of the S1000D specification is to reduce the total cost of ownership for the life of a project. While the industry has always attempted to achieve this lofty goal, standards, like S1000D, help to make it happen. Reuse is a major driver for the specification and supportive to a management process. The idea of reusing versus reauthoring or copying data will help companies remain competitive by decreasing time-to-market and, in the process, reduce documentation costs and improve information accuracy.
The specification falls under the responsibility of the Technical Publication Specification Management Group (TPSMG). To take care of the rapid development of information technology, a group of specialists, the Electronic Publications Working Group (EPWG), support the TPSMG. O'Neil has representation on the TPSMG, EPWG, Training subgroup (SCORM/ADL), and the Diagnostics Subcommittee of the USSIG, the U.S. equivalent of the EPWG. This representation (as indicated on the chart with boxes outlined in red) provides focus to the evolution of the standard, as well as guidance in that evolution. S1000D is built on a simple method of capturing data in a modular, granular way. Each of these granular modules of data (called data modules) are uniquely identified and carry their own management information inside them as well as the content that the user would normally see.
With that kind of expertise, we are indeed unmatched in our S1000D capabilities. The services we provide are:
- S1000D authoring (see Common Source Database)
- Data Module Coding Strategies
- Data Module Requirements Lists
- Legacy Conversion (to S1000D)
- Common Source Database (CSDB) (both provision and management)
- Business Process Reengineering (to get from a legacy system to an S1000D system)
- Business Rules Development
- Documentation Management Plans
- Development of Interactive Electronic Technical Publication (IETP) (browser/viewer)
- S1000D Implementation
This degree of specification knowledge and guidance has led to our core involvement in one of the first successful U.S. implementations of an S1000D, Issue 2, IETP (based solely on XML) for delivery to the UK Ministry of Defence.
Below are a couple of recently published articles on S1000D that have quotes from O'Neileans:
Federal Computer Week magazine: http://www.fcw.com/article88542-04-11-05-Print
Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) e-mag: http://www.dclab.com/s1000d_pentagon.asp