# FMV GRUND-DTD INTRODUCTION

# Purpose

The Swedish Defence needs a unified and neutral way of describing all Product Data for any materiel system used by the Army, Navy and the Air Force. One important part of product data is the technical information describing the operation and maintenance of a materiel system. This information is traditionally found in paper documents or publications, where it is given a format and is presented. In this document, information describing the operation and maintenance of a materiel system (without any presentation form) is called "technical information".

The purpose of FMV Grund-DTD is to give this technical information a modularised, neutral and content oriented structure.

# Scope

FMV Grund-DTD is a Swedish name. "FMV" stands for Forsvarets materielverk, or, in English, the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. "Grund-DTD" is Swedish for "basic DTD", or "fundamental DTD".

It is a basic or fundamental DTD, on which other DTD's may be built for specific applications. It is also the DTD for technical information in a neutral form, separated from any application specific form. This basic, "naked" information may then be presented through a specific application for a specific purpose.

FMV Grund-DTD is developed to capture and handle the technical information, and it is aimed at the long-term preservation of technical information in a neutral form, separated from its presentation or production form. The DTD is also the specification of how technical information should be encoded when delivered to FMV.

During the development special attention has been paid to the New Main Battle Tank (MBT New) now being acquired by FMV, why certain bias toward that materiel system may be detected. In view of the tests that have been conducted to evaluate the usefulness of the DTD for other types of materiel systems, we appear however to have succeeded very well in our strive to make it more general. Coming versions of FMV Grund-DTD will aim at making the DTD even more general and stable.

# Referenced standards

ISO 8879 "Information processing - Text and office systems - Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)"

ISO/IEC 10744 "Information technology - Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime)"

# Ownership and usage

FMV Grund-DTD and its documentation is the property of FMV and held in trust by FMV CALS Office. There is no additional charges or royalty connected to the FMV Grund-DTD. Users might change the structure to the DTD, but is then not allowed to use the name "FMV Grund-DTD". By using the FMV Grund-DTD, users commit themselves to give supportive feed-back. All reports on usage, applications, suggestions and critics are greatly appreciated by the FMV CALS Office.

# Maintenance

This DTD is maintained by the FMV CALS Office, with the support of Celsius Inforum AB. It is maintained under the same principles and guidelines as documented here, and with the strict intention that future versions will be compatible with this version. If backward compatibility is not possible, guidance for automatic or semi-automatic conversion will be published together with the new release.

Since the process of developing this DTD is still on-going, beneficial comments are well received to the following address:

FMV CALS Office, S-115 88 Stockholm, Sweden, Fax: int+46- 8 782 44 91

# Credits

FMV Grund-DTD came into existence through a project financed mainly by the MBT New project at FMV. The Grund-DTD project was conducted in two steps, design and development.

## Design

To get a basic understanding of the information needs within the Swedish defence, Celsius Inforum analysed approximately 25000 pages from technical publications in order to find out different types of information and their internal structures. The analysed materiel was a representative selection of publications from the army, navy and air force, and spanned all types of technical information traditionally found in technical publications. A great part of this analysis was carried out during the development of FMV Base DTD (used e.g. for the JAS 39 aircraft), which can be regarded as an earlier version of the FMV Grund-DTD.

Based on this exhaustive document analysis, DTD structural diagrams and definitions of elements and attributes were created. These were then discussed and finalised by the design team. Participants in the design team had no or little previous knowledge of SGML. The design process was based on the ideas used in the OSF DTD-project, developed by Jeanne Andalousi and Eve Mahler.

The design team consisted of the following persons:

Ulf Carlsson (FMV:UvapenS)
Lennart Eriksson (FMV:FORDON)
Thomas Faleij (FMV:FuhI/FMV CALS Office)
Jorgen Gustavsson (FMV:FARTYG/Muh)
Ulrika Hedman (FMV:FORDON)
Sven-Ake Lindberg (FMV:FuhTDOK/FMV CALS Office)
Jarl S Magnusson (FMV:FuhI/FMV CALS Office)
Lars Pettersson (FMV:AnlaggT)
Johan Weidenberg (FMV:FARTYG)
Marten Gustavsson (P4 Strf Det)
Kenneth Levander (P4 MUD Det)
Peter Bergstrom (Celsius Inforum AB)
Svante Eriksson (Celsius Inforum AB)
Leif Karlsson (Celsius Inforum AB)
Annika Lavin (Celsius Inforum AB)
Lars Sjogren (Celsius Inforum AB)

Essential help in the design of the DTD was given by Pamela Gennusa, Database Publishing Systems Ltd, and Yuri Rubinsky, SoftQuad Inc.

The following tools have been used in the design process:

- ABC Flowchart (for DTD structural diagrams)
- Microsoft Access (database holding element and attribute information)

## Development

The development of the DTD code, including testing and final documentation, was made by Peter Bergstrom and Leif Karlsson, Celsius Inforum AB. The design team was consulted when changes to the design were imposed during the development phase, too.

Essential help in the development of the HyTime links was given through comp.text.sgml discussions, and especially by Hugh Tucker, Documenta AS, Elliott Kimber, Passage Systems Inc, and Steven Newcomb, TechnoTeacher Inc.

In the development, the following tools have been used:

- Near&Far (Basic code generation)
- Omnimark (DTD validation and tests)
- Author/Editor (DTD validation and tests)
- SGMLS (DTD validation)
- MarkIt (DTD validation)
- HyMinder (HyTime validation)
- Microsoft Word (General documentation)
- Designer (General documentation)

# Consolidation

During the last year, the DTD has been used in some projects, and evaluations of its possible use in other projects have been executed. The results are still very encouraging, even if it is obvious that the softwares of today do not support all the SGML and HyTime constructs in the DTD.

FMV CALS office has also received essential input from other parties, that either have tried to use FMV Grund-DTD, or just have evaluated its usefulness for other purposes and applications. The parts of the DTD that have raised most questions and suggestions for change have been links and tables, in that order. Those are also the two parts that are most difficult to implement in today's softwares, according to the consolidation group's own experience.

The consolidation group have however decided to continue to adhere to the basic principles laid out during the design for tables and links. Some clarifications have however been made, and for the linking module it has resulted in structural changes (but not in the basic strategies).

The changes introduced in the DTD in version 1.10 are not 100 percent backwards compatible. This is most obvious in the linking module. All changes are detailed in the DTD-files, and most existing information encoded by FMV Grund-DTD will not require any conversion to comply with the new version.

For the coming year, the consolidation work will continue with more concrete tests of the functionality offered by FMV Grund-DTD. Prototype systems will be built to test it in today's software's, and demos will be developed in order to show areas of specific interest within production, management, presentation and distribution environments.

The consolidation group was formed on the design group, but some changes have been made:

Ulf Carlsson (FMV:UvapenS)
Lennart Eriksson (FMV:FORDON)
Thomas Faleij (FMV:FuhI/FMV CALS Office)
Jorgen Gustavsson (FMV:FARTYG/Muh)
Ulrika Hedman (FMV:FORDON)
Sven-Ake Lindberg (FMV:FuhI/FMV CALS Office)
Jarl S Magnusson (FMV:FuhI/FMV CALS Office)
Ake Westin (FMV:FuhI/FMV CALS Office)
Marten Gustavsson (P4 Strf Det)
Kenneth Levander (P4 MUD Det)
Joakim Erland (Sorman Information)
Tomas Eriksson (Sorman Information)
Peter Bergstrom (Celsius Inforum AB)
Leif Karlsson (Celsius Inforum AB)

# About this document

This document is written in order to describe the DTD, both in an SGML technical sense - it's a description of elements, attributes and other technical aspects of the DTD - but also to describe why the DTD has been developed, and how it fits into a greater vision.

Therefore, the first chapters of this document describes the vision of CALS within the Swedish defence and the basic principles behind the DTD. These chapters are written for anybody taking interest in FMV Grund-DTD.

The following chapters and the appendices are continuously more technical, and written more specifically for people who are about to implement the DTD, or who wants to know more of its details.

Sometimes it has been inevitable to use Swedish terms in the documentation. Whenever a Swedish term or expression is used, it is indicated by an italic typeface: svenska.

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