An IETM or Interactive Electronic Technical Manual is a portal to manage technical documentation. IETMs compress volumes of text into just CD-ROMs or online pages which may include sound and video, and allow readers to locate needed information far more rapidly than in paper manuals.
Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals services in india
We are empaneled vendors to supply software to DRDO, ASL, BDL, ECIL and many other OEMs who supplies systems and sub systems to various Indian Defense agencies.
IETM systems and how they have evolved over time can be broken down into five classes which represent how technology has advanced over the years to the kinds of manuals we would expect to see in this day and age.
Class I
Class I refers to manuals that were created in the form of printed books with scanned page images before the technology was available to create them from scratch on a computer. From the scanned pages, indexes and tables of contents were hyperlinked to specific parts of the document so that the relevant information could be found more easily. These kinds of manuals would still follow the chronological order of the pages, as if they were a physical paper manual.
Class II
In class II, the manuals were still page-oriented and followed a chronological order, where the pages in PDF format included cross-links. These manuals used hypertext links that took the user to other areas in the document, making the manuals in this class easier to navigate for relevant information. Multimedia was able to be used in this kind of manual, where it could not be added in the scanned pages of Class I.
Class III
In Class III, this is where we began to see more of the free-flowing format that we might associate with electronic manuals today, rather than individual ‘pages’ (scanned/ typeset and presented in PDF format) found in previous classes. These large data sets still followed the order of the content in the manual with a high focus on creating hyperlinks using SGML/XML and viewing the content in a browser. It was possible to print these documents too, however, there would be no correlation to the way the printed content looked from the visible formatting on the screen.
Class IV
This kind of IETM was specifically made to be viewed electronically, and was ‘data driven’, meaning that the data was stored in a database thus removing data redundancy. Data was presented in a ‘relational’ manner accessed through hyperlinks tagged using SGML or XML. Class IV specifications moved away with the concept of a static page, and focused on content to be presented dynamically based on user specific needs. A big advancement based on how technology (the world of computers, devices, electronic + online content publishing) was evolving.
Class V
In this final and most advanced class, it was intended that the output would be integrated with expert systems that could display a combination of differing content sets in some sort of self-learning system. Maybe, similar to the approach used in Google search, where search results improve over time based on a large number of queries & searches entered by users.
The 5 classes of IETM as described above were created by the US DoD way back when the PCs were still not very common in the market. It was a futuristic approach considering how the manuals would/ could be made interactive. This is evident from the fact that they left the details of the interactivity of Class 5 very vague.
But in the nineties S1000D came into existence and changed the game. It took the interactivity well beyond the 5 classes, and more importantly created a landscape that would reshape how the industry would not only create a good interactive manual, but also utilise the specification for collaborative working.
Large, complex and expensive equipment are not designed by one single agency; multiple agencies need to function together for all aspects of the equipment life cycle – design, production, assembly, maintenance, repairs and overhauls. S1000D makes this collaboration easier.