Developing a standards agenda for safety critical multimedia systems

There is an increasing demand for hypermedia delivery of technical documentation for safety critical systems. In many ways this documentation is as safety critical as the systems it documents, in that errors in the documentation can cause catastrophic maintenance failures. For this reason there need to be standards regulating the production of hypermedia documentation in these areas, but most of the work being done is directed towards data formats for storage and delivery, rather than on quality of content. The paper discusses the types of standard that might be relevant to this activity, along with some examples taken from the author´s experience of instances of that type of standard. This discussion is used as a basis for the proposal of a standards framework for hypermedia technical documentation systems and a research agenda, based on some of the author´s work, for development of such standards