Adaptive electronic technical manuals (AETMs)

Summary form only given. An interactive electronic technical manual (IETM) is a technical manual that is prepared in digital format to provide information about the diagnostics and maintenance of complex mechanical systems of military or commercial nature. Specifications are issued by several organizations that dictate how such manuals are to be organized, primarily written in SGML. Such manuals can run to be very big in size and present a difficulty for the user to navigate through to find the requested information. We present a methodology in which the information space of the IETM is reduced and "adapted" to the user, so that only pertinent information of interest is shown, while others are hidden. We propose a UML-based technique to model the user of our system. We also present a Web services, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)-based alternative to the traditional IETM architecture.