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

With the increasing use of the internet and electronic commerce it is important task to transform the paper-made technical manual into digitalized and networked one. 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 manual. In the fields of manufacturing and maintenance of airplane, ships, military weapons, automobiles and heavy cranes they save the enormous costs and times by utilizing the IETM. The digitalized technical manual makes it easy to copy and transfer its contents and it is unnecessary to hold the warehouse and transportation for technical manual. By utilizing the database technology developed for storing and searching the large amount of data it is unnecessary to search data by page or sequentially. Through the hypermedia function developed with the internet we car, 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 clicks the IETM through the network, he can take the technical education interactively from the IETM manufacturer. In the recent IETM 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.