S1000D International Specification
S1000D is an internationally recognised specification for the procurement and production of technical publications. Initially developed for the aerospace and defence industry, S1000D has now been adopted and modified for use with land, sea and commercial vehicles and equipment due to the time and cost saving advantages identified by these sectors.
Commercial shipping is one of the latest industries to see the advantages of using such standards for their technical publications. Before adopting S1000D, ship owners would take delivery of piles of technical manuals for the operation and maintenance of their vessels. This caused many problems, not only because of the sheer size of the publication suite or the storage needed, but also maintain the data to an accurate standard, which was a near impossible task.
S1000D solves this problem by utilising a Common Source Database (CSDB) which is a repository for all the individual chunks of data (known as Data Modules) which contain text and/or graphics.
The data modules can then be reused time after time for many different projects and publications. This virtually eliminates duplication of data and enables updating and maintaining the data a manageable task, whilst allowing on-the-fly creation of publications for any given customer or product.
This introduces huge time and cost saving advantages from authoring right up to publication production, as data modules can be simply ‘plugged in’ to any projects’ documentation as required.
Other major advantages of applying the S1000D specification are:
- S1000D is based on internationally agreed neutral standards
- Many different output forms can be generated from a single XML/SGML data source, reducing costs
- Reduces maintenance costs for technical information and overall Product Life-Cycle costs
- S1000D data module concept can be applied to legacy data (see our Legacy Data Conversion page)
- Huge cost savings associated with reuse of information (vs. recreating new information each time)
- Provides a single standard to support communications and data exchange among all participants in a given project - and more importantly industry
- It is non-proprietary and allows neutral delivery and management of data
The shipping industry's adaptation of S1000D is known as the Shipdex Protocol. Daedalus fully back initiatives such as Shipdex and we are a member of the Shipdex community. We are using our knowledge and experience from S1000D in aerospace to help develop the specification into an industry wide standard for technical publications in shipping. For more information visit Shipdex.com
Daedalus can convert any of your existing legacy data into S1000D data modules using proven processes and our custom software. Please see our Legacy Data Conversion page for more information.