Getting started with S1000D – what is it and why use it?

Now there’s a question.

And not one that I’m going to attempt to answer in its entirety in the space of this article, but I’ll do my best to explain what it is and why we use it

Let’s start with the basics.

S1000D is a specification for the production and delivery of technical publications.

Adopting the S1000D specification helps manufacturers to reduce the cost and complexity of technical documentation production.

S1000D was originally used by European defence organisations who needed the ability to share technical information throughout the supply chain. Today it is widely adopted globally for:

• Defense systems – including land, sea, and air products
• Civil aviation products
• Construction industry products
• Ship industry products

The best way to perhaps explain the concept is to use an example that we’re familiar with – A car.

If I’m the manufacturer of a motor vehicle, I have to provide a vehicle user manual for customers. It’s an important document because consumers need to know how to operate and maintain the vehicle.  Typically, with a car, it would come in the form of a printed book, but sometimes that same data is available online, in an App for your phone or numerous other formats.

Now let’s consider some potential problems here.

We, as the car manufacturer, don’t make every single part of the car from scratch. We have a vast supply chain of products which are integrated during the manufacturing process. The manufacturers of all of those systems, components or equipment have to deliver their user manuals for us to integrate within our final vehicle user manual.

Now imagine all of these supplier companies are writing their documentation their own way. One company writes theirs in Word using their company templates. The next uses a tool which enables them to publish on the web and another supplier has historically just created a leaflet for their equipment with very little information at all.

This would soon become an absolute nightmare for us, the car manufacturer, to manage and integrate with our final technical documentation for the consumer.

The crux of the issue here is that we need some control around the format and structure of the data we are all producing and ultimately integrating.  S1000D helps with all of this in several ways.

Format
Instead of writing in traditional ways, e.g. in MS Word, or whatever other writing tool you might use, S1000D content is written in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format.
XML is a language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data.

In simple terms, it’s a way in which we can write, manage and exchange all of the user manual data we talked about above, in a completely neutral – but vitally, structured – format, which is not proprietary to any one software vendor.

Structure
S1000D uses a modular principle for data. In our car example, you would have a single documented procedure for opening the bonnet/hood of your car, and this procedure would be referenced by any procedure for which the maintainer needed to access the engine bay of the vehicle e.g. topping up the engine oil, changing spark plugs, changing brake fluid etc.

This means we don’t duplicate information over and over by writing that same ‘access the engine bay’ procedure, but instead, one single written piece of content holds that ‘single point of truth’ for that user instruction or procedure.

Each one of these modular procedures, or descriptions, are known as Data Modules (DMs). S1000D revolves around this DM concept and you’ll hear lots more about DMs as your S1000D journey progresses.

This modular approach, along with the neutral XML format of the data, is what makes S1000D so useful, particularly with larger equipment with numerous partners involved, all of whom need to exchange or feed data into a final end user manual.

Output
Another advantage of this neutral format is that we don’t have to be tied to one particular output, S1000D is designed for omni-channel publishing.

If we want to publish a full PDF maintenance manual, we can! If we want to publish the same data to the web, we can. If one customer wants the data in an electronic viewer (IETP), no problem!

There’s a whole host of other aspects to the specification which also enable companies to integrate their documentation into a final deliverable, and also encourage data reuse – another great benefit of S1000D. The latter is particularly useful if you have variants of your products. But that’s for another day.

So, to summarise, S1000D helps by providing a common, vendor neutral, structured format by which data can be created, managed, and exchanged. The modular format enables content reuse across different publications, and single source publishing is made possible meaning we can output to various formats from the same source data. That simple description is of course very much diluting and possibly underselling what is a very powerful specification, but we have to start somewhere, and this hopefully gives us something to build on.
There’s a whole heap of other aspects to the specification which help enable companies to write and manage documentation for extremely complex pieces of equipment, particularly around enabling and encouraging data reuse – another great benefit of S1000D. But that’s for another day.

Hopefully the above covers the basics, but if you want to find out more the following links offer additional information:

Xignal S1000D YouTube Channel – Subscribe to our channel for videos to help you get started with S1000D authoring, converting existing data from MS Word and (coming soon) free training resources

The Simple Guide to S1000D – a LinkedIn newsletter dedicated to offering information and advice to help you get started with S1000D

The S1000D website – This web site is provided by the S1000D Council and Steering Committee.  As well as a history of the S1000D specification and benefits of adoption, this site contains free downloads of the S1000D specification and XML schemas

Our team are also on hand to answer any specific questions you have about adopting S1000D and getting started with the specification.  You can get in touch at [email protected] or by completing the form on our contact page.