Technical documentation is used in many areas of the everyday life. Nearly everything has to be provided with at minimum a drawing including a few locators. The product liability and many other issues regarding consumer protection have to be covered inside technical documentation. A special form of technical documentation is electronical technical documentation, a further subform is interactive electronical technical documentation (IETD). The complexity of IETD especially regarding the huge mass of data elements, their linkage and the version management issuing and release process must be controlled via a special document management system. To handle these complex structures of ASD Spec. 1000D IETDs, the Common Source Data Base is necessary.
The aim of a CSDB (Common Source Data Base, in accordance with specification S1000D) is to provide the user (mainly technical authors, illustrators and publication managers) with automated processes to handle the complete palette of CSDB objects. S1000D is an international specification for the procurement and production of technical publications
Starting with the smallest addressable unit, the DataModules under the use of different dtd's or schemas has to be supported. Furthermore the publications, comments, in process review forms (IPRF's) for authoring reasons must be provided. Last but not least the illustrations and all kinds of hotspot declaration files have to be assisted.
Processes to perform the S1000D file based exchange between customer and/or industry, to generate complete IETDs and to verify all these processes, the CSDB must ensure data integrity and security during all actions listed above. Data integrity is a term used in Computer science and Telecommunications that can mean ensuring data is "whole" or complete the condition in which data are
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These technical publications consist of DataModules (DMs), Illustrations (ICNs), partly hotspot-declarations and its Info Object instance (IO). The Info Object instance (XML file, using a special Document Type Definition) consists of DM- and ICN-references to guide the loading process into a retrieval system and to build the table of content, partly the list of applicable publications LOAP. Don't change "Extensible" Document Type Definition ( DTD) is one of several SGML and XML schema languages and is also the term used to describe a document or portion thereof that
The basic mechanism is to copy S1000D objects like DMs, IPRF's or Illustrations out of the secured vault of a CSDB into a working area, to avoid that more than one user is able to change the object. After the changes have been performed, the object will be copied back to the CSDB vault and its issue increased.
Furthermore the CSDB is able to support technical authors or operators with a checking environment. A technical writer is a professional writer who designs writes creates maintains and updates technical Documentation &mdashincluding Online help, User guides The checks result in standardized files like CSV or plain text, to ensure an easy transfer to the originator of the checked data. In Computing, plain text is a term used for an ordinary "unformatted" sequential file readable as textual material without much processing The originator may be the technical author during the authoring process or in case of international data exchange in accordance with ASD/AIA S1000D, an industrial partner respective a sub-contractor who delivers documentation.
The checks enclose tests against official documents like:
– business rules of the programme
– guidance documents
– style guide documents
– ASD/AIA S1000D and its versions
– or starting at the version 2. 3 of S1000D, against the business rule exchange datamodule (BREX DM).
If the customer is interested in national/translated and customized documentation out of the common documentation, a nationalization process must be supported of the CSDB.
Data exchange routines and automatisms are the most important reason to develop a CSDB, to ensure a process reliability. Data exchange is the process of taking Data structured under a source Schema and actually transforming it into data structured under a target The import and export routines can be fully automated or be performed via CSDB operator.
The components of a Data exchange package are for example:
– one data dispatch note (DDN)
– a certain amount of datamodules (DMs) and
– all illustrations, referenced by the DMs above.
The identifier of a DDN is the (DDN-Id) found within the sgml/xml file and expressed in the filename plus related extension.
The identifier of the DM is the data module code (DMC) found within the sgml/xml file and expressed in the filename plus related extension.
The identifier of the Illustration is the illustration control number (ICN) found within the cgm/tif/mil/cg4/etc. file and expressed in the filename plus related extension.
These packages contain all necessary information to provide the receiver with the necessary information.
The CSDB must provide or support the complete Integrated Logistics Support (ILS) process with its information. Integrated Logistics Support (ILS is a technique introduced by the US Army to ensure that the supportability of an equipment is considered during its design and development Thus detailed query and search masks have to be delivered.
A good solution may be to use commercial off-the-shelf database products to implement business logic. Commercial off-the-shelf ( COTS) is a term for Software or Hardware, generally technology or computer products that are ready-made and available for sale Business logic is a non-technical term generally used to describe the functional Algorithms which handle Information exchange between a Database and a The CSDB must be able to handle all file formats supported via the actual version of Spec. A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a Computer file. 1000D.