Documentation for aircraft maintenance based on topic maps

Fast and easy processing of documentation for maintenance and overhaul is of high importance for many companies, especially in the aircraft domain. The documentation of a certain aircraft often comprises thousands of pages, which today mostly exist as paper-based documents. To use the benefits of electronic technical manuals, we define a description language for storing Aircraft Maintenance Manuals (AMM) based on Topic Maps, which is called XTM-P (XML Topic Map for Procedures). Besides syntactic information, this language is used to capture semantic information for supporting smart adaptation to multiple output devices and modalities. Several concepts of this language are described.