Vision

The vision of (IC) is to address the burgeoning use of XML as the format of preference for the electronic transfer of complex information to and between various systems. The Company's combination of conversion experience, technology experience and general high level of software expertise places it in a position to offer a unique and competitively superior approach to converting information into more usable formats.

Information on networks that is connected to many different types of computers and multiple systems has to be usable on all of them. Public information cannot afford to be restricted to one make or model or manufacturer or format, or to cede control of its data format to private hands. Such information also needs to be in a form that can be reused in many different ways. Proprietary data formats, no matter how well documented or publicized, are not an option; their control still resides in private hands and they can be changed or withdrawn arbitrarily without notice.

Two of these proprietary formats are paper and PDF. They are very similar, in that the information in both is difficult to access from external systems. PDF, in particular, has been used extensively in the US Department of Defense to satisfy the requirement for electronic documents, with an estimated 100,000,000 pages of reusable material in the three major services alone. Now that XML use is increasing, there is increasing pressure to gain access to these PDF documents to integrate them into broader enterprise systems for managing conflicts; however, no affordable tool exists to translate from PDF to XML, so the material is becoming increasingly out-of-date. Current approaches to retrieving such data are limited by errors in the PDF documents and the use of mostly manual processes. This has led to expensive per page costs, beyond the ability of the Military Services to support in this era of very tight support budgets.

Background

In the early 1990's, prior to the advent of the Internet, PDF and computer CD=ROMS came into being. In the mid-1990's. the Armed Services and many other organizations began using PDF as the storage medium of choice and an extensive effort took place starting in about 1996 to convert millions of pages of documents to PDF. The alternative language, SGML, has also been used extensively, but has not taken hold because of the complexities and expense of tagging documents. When the Web came into being, HTML, the main language of the Internet, was considered as an alternative, but was not complex enough to support tagging between disparate systems such as parts catalogs and assembly drawings. The solution that is rapidly being adopted as the middle ground is XML, which is conducive to direct authoring, automatic tagging and access using a Web Browser. Over the next 5-10 years, the use of XML will increase as the Web, Browser user interface, and broadband become the standards for commercial business systems. This will cause many other legacy systems to move toward integration of XML and require the conversion of their existing data and information to XML compliant formats.

The current method of distributing PDF manuals is to place them on CD-ROMs and deliver them with a custom Windows viewer that must be installed to navigate through them. If links between documents are implemented, the CD-ROMs must be changed. If the computer does not have a working CD-ROM, then the documents are unviewable. If the computer is slow and the documents are large, the documents may be viewable but very slowly and too inefficient for effective use in the field, ship or flightline.

For stand-alone manuals or documents, access from a web browser is sufficient provided that the document can be assessed in sections and sub-sections. Such access avoids the issue of accessing the entire document and its graphics as a single large entity. The document can then be accessed and viewed using any Web Browser on any computer. It can also be used in wireless situations where the bandwidth of the link is limited

For environments where many documents need to be linked together, integration into an Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) serves to provide the user with a complete resource for operating or maintaining the equipment described in the documents. Efficient use of IETMs requires an integrated database and the ability to rapidly jump between documents when they are linked without inserting multiple CDs. Thus IETMs are typically hosted on a Web Server as are the stand-alone documents, and the Browser is used as the linking agent between them.