XDoc Converter Provides Rules Engine for
Extracting Content From PDF, Microsoft Word, and
Other Legacy Formats Into Military Standard
DTD's Such as MIL STD-3001
CAMBRIDGE, MA –
September 16, 2003 -
Continuing its mission to help organizations
realize significant business gains using XML
technology, CambridgeDocs
(www.cambridgedocs.com) today announced support
for the MIL STD 3001 DTD and other military
schemas geared to help structure and describe
the volumes of technical, training and
maintenance material in use within both
government and civilian institutions.
CambridgeDocs' support of these standards is an
effort to help the vast numbers of government
contractors and manufacturers migrate libraries
of existing content into these standards based,
re-purposable formats. Once in these formats,
content can be delivered in more convenient and
highly dynamic fashions as well as be updated
more accurately and easily by approved subject
matter experts.
MIL STD 3001 and its related schemas like
MIL-M-81210F and MIL-PRF-87268A have evolved
over the past decade to help technical writers
develop conventional documentation and
Interactive Electronic Training Manuals (IETM)
often geared towards military use, but are
beginning to see adoption in the commercial
sector as well. While DocBook, another
documentation standard, is frequently used for
general authoring, these military standards were
developed by the United States Navy specifically
for documents that require series of
"Procedures" and "Steps" defined under broader
"Work Packages" that are often used to
troubleshoot complex systems like the fuel
system of an Apache Helicopter or advanced
wiring diagrams.
"Given the demand for better maintenance
material, and better mediums for the delivery of
that material, migrating existing content into
these formats is essential," said Brian Gritte,
Program Manager for L-3 Communications,
Government Services Inc. Maintenance Mentoring
System (MMS). MMS products are highly
specialized IETMs that integrate data and
procedures from technical manuals with other
job-related materials (electrical schematics,
wiring diagrams, etc.) and arranges them
according to a technician's natural work
sequence and immediate information needs.
"CambridgeDocs is enabling us to transform vast
amounts of existing unstructured content into
standards conformant format. With that we can
then deliver that content electronically via our
MMS on demand in real-time situations. A
helicopter mechanic is not going to have to leaf
through 5 different 2000 page manuals to
troubleshoot a system, but is now able to
navigate quickly and easily through a series of
touch screens to pinpoint and repair any issue,"
he added.
"Much like DocBook, these military standards are
designed to be independent of any presentation
elements and instead tag elements within the
document according to their use and relationship
to other elements," said Michael Bronder,
CambridgeDocs' Product Manager. "There may be
several steps involved in a certain procedure,
but some of those steps might also be reused in
many other procedures. For instance connecting a
grounding cable to an airplane wing might be the
first step in any procedure involving an
airplane's fuel system. Once these relationships
are defined companies like L-3 Communications,
GSI can be very creative in their delivery of
content, and can also provide manufacturers with
the ability to update content with superior ease
and accuracy."
The xDoc Converter, from CambridgeDocs, is able
to transform content from existing legacy
formats, such as Microsoft Word documents and
PDF files, extract relevant information, and
produce DTD or schema-compliant XML, as well as
recombine those elements in a dynamic publishing
process to create new custom documents. The xDoc
Converter contains a sophisticated parsing
engine that can be customized to output XML for
any schema or DTD as well as publish to PDF, RTF
or HTML. Without an automated tool like xDoc,
organizations would have to re-type tens of
thousands of pages of existing content in XML to
recognize similar benefits.
About CambridgeDocs
CambridgeDocs is a leader in the emerging market for XML-based content
integration and publishing. This market deals
with the integration of legacy content with new
XML-based systems (e.g. Content Management,
Enterprise Information Portals, EAI, and Web
Services) and standards (e.g. DocBook, HRXML,
RIXML, IRXML, FPML, DAS-XML, NewsML, any custom
XML schema/DTD's, etc.).
Towards this end, CambridgeDocs provides a
technology platform & services for taking
existing unstructured and semi-structured
internal and external content (e.g. MS Word,
HTML, PDF, Quark, etc.), and transforming it
into "meaningful XML." Once transformed, the
content can be made available for delivery
through XML-based Web Services, classified and
indexed within Enterprise Information Portals,
and aggregated, assembled and published in
multiple different formats including support for
wireless and mobile devices.
The xDoc Converter is the first step in
CambridgeDocs' strategy for providing Content
Interoperability via a middleware platform, the
CambridgeDocs XML Content Backbone. The
CambridgeDocs XML Content Backbone allows for
the sharing, indexing, migration, repurposing,
republishing and delivery of content between
numerous legacy formats and a variety of
enterprise content systems.
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