Implementation of an interactive electronic technical manual based on web-multimedia technology

Abstract

With the increasing use of the Internet and electronic commerce it is an important task to transform the paper-made technical manual into digitalized and networked version. With the advent of new multimedia technology and the omnipresence of network facilities, this trend is compelling. The technology of compiling, storing and generating text data, graphics and images makes the IETM (interactive electronic technical manual) attractive with respect to the paper-made technical manuals. In the fields of manufacturing and maintenance of airplanes, ships, military weapons, automobiles and heavy cranes one can save enormous costs and time by utilizing the IETM. The digitalized technical manual makes it easy to copy and transfer its contents and it is unnecessary to hold a warehouse and transportation for technical manuals. By utilizing the database technology developed for storing and searching a large amount of data it is unnecessary to search data by page or sequentially. Through the hypermedia function developed with the Internet we can move the search point between the data freely according to the requirement and the level of the users. Since the insertion, storage, and reference of the images, audio and video data can be done freely the quality of technical manual could be enhanced. While the technical manual shows the chart, diagram, and graphs statically, the IETM shows the operation of instruments and the operation of maintenance dynamically. Further if the user accesses the IETM through the network, he can obtain technical education interactively from the IETM manufacturer. In recent IETMs, users can order the required components through the IETM. In this paper we developed a prototype of IETM which can input the contents of manual freely, classify the index of contents automatically, and generate the index/keyword automatically.